Director: Maqbool Khan
Cast: Ishaan Khatter, Ananya Panday
Khaali Peeli is a film that brazenly celebrates every Bollywood cliché that ever existed. There are two stories of childhood separation that form the essence of the plot- of a boy who is separated first from his father and then from his childhood sweetheart. The villain is a man by name Yusuf Chikna (Jaideep Ahlawat) who runs a prostitution ring. The boy, Vijay (Ishaan Khattar), has now grown up into a cabbie and the girl Pooja (Ananya Panday) has just taken flight from Yusuf’s den with a bagful of cash and jewels. Man proposes one way and then God..oops, Bollywood disposes, so it’s only normal Vijay and Pooja’s paths cross again. Pooja hops into Vijay’s taxi as she’s on the run from Yusuf’s men, but there’s a problem. It’s been ten years and they don’t recognize one another. It doesn’t help that they went by different names when they were kids. Vijay was Blackie (he used to sell black tickets) and Pooja was Red Riding Hood.
Well made pulp-heist films own their place in cinema. Khaali Peeli’s ambitions are pointed towards this too and the ingredients are all there. You have runway thugs, bagfuls of money, badass villains and of course, clueless cops running around in circles. The screenplay is even spattered with short non-linear bursts to amp up the style quotient. But the problem here is in the story and the writing. The dialogues are pedestrian for the most part and the story hardly has anything novel going for it. Save for a handful of scenes, every next sequence is fairly predictable. The only saving grace is Jaideep Ahlawat, who’s a towering presence as the menacing Yusuf. Some of the scenes he features in, like the one where he ambushes a young Vijay and Pooja at a movie theatre, are a riot. What doesn’t help at all is also the thoughtless insertion of choreographed set-piece songs at various points in the film. There’s one at a Mela (fair), and another set in a garage, with welding sparks flying in the background as Ishaan and Ananya shake a leg to a rather forgettable number. This was funny I thought, as the script itself was falling apart and could have done with some much-needed welding at this point.
I guess one can’t say he/she wasn’t warned. The film opens with this dialogue from Vijay, “Two things are important in life- one is Tashan and the other is Emotion”! Towards the end of the film, he also goes on to say, “My life has been like a Bollywood film”. It was rather ironic I thought then that this film that considers itself an ode to Bollywood, and has family reunion as one of its central themes, has been at the receiving end of massive nepotism related backlash.
Overall rating: 2/5
