Teri kurti sexy lagti hai," sings Arjun Rampal to his screen-wife Amisha Patel before he goes blind...and the film goes bust.
Wish we could see anything remotely sexy in this sterile thriller about a blind man, his beautiful wife and his closet-psychotic friend, played by Arjun, Amisha and Zayed Khan with all the correct pauses in-between fits of passion.
But alas, nothing finally fits in "Vaada". It's like an over-elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Someone evidently read the instruction booklet on whodunits too carefully. So much attention is given to the fine print that the overall framework appears to miss the bus...and the buzz.
Dead at the centre, cruelly unproductive at heart, "Vaada" is one of those could've-beens that don't take long to become has-beens. The cruellest blow to the audiences' expectations (no matter how low) is that the thriller, as written by Rumi Jaffrey, has the potential to grip.
The narrative just lets it droop...and drip until the basic story tapers into a blow-dried dead-end. Very often in the course of this stiff-and-over-conditioned film you ask yourself if director Satish Kaushik was briefed to make a play on film.
If so, the narrative ought to have been free of those frisky flights of fancy into foreign shores for Himesh Reshammiya's can't-get-over-you song sequences.
Styled like the Michael Caine-Dyan Canon-Christopher Reeve thriller "Deathtrap", "Vaada" tries to create an aura of upper class languor.
