Ghayal Once Again – Oh Sunny! what hath thou wrought

There are some movies which are once in a generation.  There are others  which come with an average expectation but are an instant hit. And there are some which re-establishes the old and the dying of Bollywood.  To put the curtain down Ghayal –Once Again is not any of them.

Ghayal-Once Again is not a movie it is an experiment which vied to discover a catalyst that would soar the dipping career of Paaji but in the process has surely drowned it. The intelligentia of the script touched record low levels. At few points it  dipped so low that scientist could go on a deep water exploration using it.

Doesn't makes sense here? Make me watch a movie like this and I can bemuse you with more such paranoid activities here.

Ghayal-Once Again  is a revenge orientied movie. Not only the script but actually. It is a statement loud and clear to all reigning Khans of Bollywood who are feigning their long lost charisma through decrepit movies. It says that if you can befool and bore the audience with melodramatic dialogues like'15 saal-9 mahine-4 din...' etc. etc. then I can also return with a script which is 'ghayal' right from the word go.

So we have Ajay Mehra(Sunny Deol) as a messiah and famous reporter. In one scene when he boards a moving local train evryone identifies him "Arey ye to Ajay Mehra hai" much similar to the Spiderman of New York. Raj Bansal(Narendra Jha) is a rich, egoist and influential businessman. he gets the server of Ministry of Telecommunications hacked to fix a tender one day in advance. How?  " Sir, it is hacked. here is the printout" done. So mean of me to expect a full technical hacking process in a movie. Ok. But in such a rudimentary method? What a farce to professional hackers. Bansal's son is a , no-points-for-guessing, spoiled brat. We are told if the son is inflicted even a wound then the stock markets of India would tumble down. Shrewd economist and a share broker here.

Om Puri is reduced to a sacrificial character, whose death was supposed to arouse in the audience the first passionate disliking for Bansal. 

Narendra Jha justified his character but the plot always had a void of Balwant Rai (Amrish Puri) of Ghayal or Katya (Danny) of Ghatak.

Soha Ali Khan did beautifully what she was expected to-a supporting actress with few emotional outbursts. She could never match Meenakshi Sheshadri though. Even Deol's anger index was a notch below the first Ghayal.

The story is based upon the fact that when an antagonist does not interferes with the protagonist then the protagonist, in a quest to prove his protagonism, unnecessary meddles with the antagonist.

Four kids, who by the movie standards are cool as they use cool technical words like Blogging and Downloading quite often, have just won a bravery award. They get hold of some bad secrets about Raj Bansal which they intend to hand over to Ajay Mehra. Bansal's henchman chase the kids in streets, off the streets , parking lot, inside mall and where not. How? GPS buddy! At one stage Bansal directly asked the Defence secretary to give him access to high resolution satelite imagery of Mumbai to enable the henchmen for better chasing. Thankfully he was said 'No'. 

The film had all the masala of 90s bollywood . The stalest was saved for the climax- 'wo bachhi teri beti hai Ajay'. And so Ajay Mehra hijacked Bansal's helicopter and flew to his high rise empire. How? Hijacked we were told, that's it.  All we saw was Ajay seated on the driving seat of helicopter.

The film gave had many moments to prod us to leave. One such was when Ajay jumped off a fast running local to another local in opposite direction safely. He sighed so we knew he was safe.

I am a huge Sunny Paaji fan as early as his Salaakhein, Zor, Ziddi. I also feel that any creative art deserves huge respect. But when you base your expectations on massive hits like Ghayal (1990) or Ghatak (1996) then Ghayal Once Again comes a cropper.

A shrewd movie critic will sit through the endings but will never reveal it to you . I, for one, not being a specialist  and all the more drunken in my venegeance towards series of mind numbing scenes  left the movie 20 mins before a surely indigestible ending.