Roy’s slick poster and the catchy song Sooraj Dooba Hai managed to create a certain curiosity value about
the film. Alas, the film does not live up to either the poster or the song.
The story is about a super-successful director, Kabir Grewal
(Arjun Rampal) embarking on his new film. This is the third of his franchise
involving a thief, Roy (Ranbir Kapoor). Kabir is self-centred, arrogant and has
the reputation of a playboy, with his flings being remembered only as numbers
and not names. With almost no script (he is scripting the film too – and decides
to shoot without either a story or a script) he flies off with his whole crew
to Malayasia where his film is based. There he meets a London-based filmmaker Ayesha
Aamir (Jacqualine Fernandez) and begins to woo her. His love story gets
reflected in Roy’s.
The pace of the film is unhurried at best and sluggish at
worst. None of the characters are gripping or charismatic. The stories (both, Kabir’s
and Roy’s) have no depth.
On the plus sight, the movie is beautiful, beautiful,
beautiful visually. There is no melodrama and no excessive dialogues (there is
no excessive or otherwise story either – but hey, let’s stick to the plus
points here, shall we?). The people are all beautiful, super rich, very
successful and simplistically gullible to each other. It is a lovely, languid
and somewhat lethargic world.
At some point the debutant director (also the writer of the movie)
attempts to layer the film with creating a possibility that Roy is real and
Kabir is basing his movies on a real-life thief. But this possible layer is
quickly lost very early on.
On a vague and far-off note, that this movie could have been
“inspired” by the superb Shakespeare In
Love which credited the genius outpouring from the bard’s pen to his
ecstatic love affair. But even though Roy
tries to say the same story, there is nothing about the direction or pace
that helps the desperately earnest actors in any way. All the actors are competent
spouting seemingly deep lines with sincerity.
A little more work on the story and speed of the movie to
keep pace with the visual extravagance would have been time and money
well-invested. As it is now, Roy seems
destined to sink at the box office. One person in the theatre (evidently bored
out of his mind) made a loud, sarcastic comment at the end of the movie “Kya picture banaya – issko Oscar milega”.