A project coming from the production house of Shahrukh Khan himself with an all young starcast, revolving around four school friends and their problems. This one line description of the film sounds pretty interesting following the current trend of teen movies. And then Shahrukh coming forward to promote the film in full spirits featuring in a peppy music video further raises the expectation level of the viewers to greater heights, especially of Shahrukh's own fans residing all over the world. In fact that was the reason why I eagerly opted for this movie before the other major releases this Friday, to actually see the contribution made by The KING himself in the movie as per the reports.
But sadly what was served to the viewers in the theater in those two tiring hours was completely out of sync, directionless and a complete mess made out of some good intentions. Directed by Roshan Abbas as his first attempt, it is said to be based on his more than a decade old play called "Graffiti". The play might have been good but the film is not even close to be called a worth watching venture. Written around the problems and love life of four school friends, it seems that the director basically wants to talk about the generation gap between the kids and the parents. But very strangely this basic idea gets a clear projection, only after almost one third of the movie is over. Before that the sequences keep coming in from different directions without having any kind of relation with each other.
Actually the various sections of the film try to cover so many diverse aspects of the younger generation that in the end it all becomes an un- explainable chaos. For instance, suddenly from no-where a pregnancy test sequence is thrown into the movie which at once makes you think that "What is this all happening?" The writers try to put in whatever they can think of ranging from classroom scenes, Shakespeare, drug peddling, wanna be heroines, corrupt policemen, students suicide, a deadly accident and much more. The film goes on and on without any direction or aim and you just cannot get it.
In clear words, I seriously suspect that the project must have been started with some clear vision and a to-the-point story-plot. But with the passing time there were so many changes forcibly made into its script that it all got entangled and the result was a complete NO SHOW. Particularly the repetitive "Romeo-Juliet" play, the uninspiring school premises scenes and its noisy out of the place background score, really put you off and one even starts regretting his decision of watching the film. On top of it, after almost two hours of all useless drama, the director even gets confused that how should he essentially finish the film now. And then it all ends with again a supposed to be inspirational song-dance number which could have made an impact in a different film.
Moreover the title of the movie also remains as confusing as its unimpressive content and I really wonder that being the producers, didn't Gauri Khan or Shahrukh see the movie while it was still in the making?
Truly speaking, the only thing I enjoyed in AKK was watching Giselle Monteiro on the screen who interestingly gets a meatier role and looks more beautiful than her first film LOVE AAJ KAL. Though she still struggles in her emotional scenes and dialogue delivery but even then remains a treat to be watched on the celluloid. Zoa Morani, as the rebellion girl looks the most confident of them all and impresses. Both the boys are fine with Ali Fazal scoring above than Satyajeet Dubey, but all the seniors in the cast including Lillette Dubey, Navneet Nishaan, Satish Shah, Manoj Joshi, Mukesh Tiwari and Vijay Raaz simply do not rise above the routine.
In short, the intentions may have been right and the subject might be socially important, but it's the end result which really counts in front of the audience. And in this particular case the film is nothing more than a directionless clutter.
