Ghanchakkar Review

In Raj Kumar Gupta’s underachieved last film No One Killed Jessica – based on the Jessica Lal murder case – the killer Manu’s mother’s character was sketched only for some comic relief. She appeared thrice on screen, with only one line on her dialogue sheet. Now with this kind of flair for comedy, I was already worried about Gupta’s outing in a comic-thriller, given the trailers of Ghanchakkar itself, where we find one such character again (with the same number of screen appearances in the film). This fellow is a late night train commuter who bumps into the goons with different vegetables in a bag. You see his face, and then he disappears, and then you see him again. Okay, then what? Well, for starters there is also Vidya Balan who punctuates every sentence of hers with a “Hein?” Faking the Punjabi accent would’ve never seemed harder.

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Special 26

Neeraj Pandey measured the strength and angst of our fragile society in his terrific debut A Wednesday, where a man, any face from the crowd whose name and religion really didn't matter, mirrored the loopholes of our judiciary system and took the charge of demonstrating instant justice as a vigilante; the man who even hesitated and begged to pardon him for spewing out one expletive in frustration while in an engaging debate on phone with the Police Commissioner of Mumbai. That was an uncompromised, need-of-the-hour cinema by Pandey in 2008.