Bollywood is going through a evolutionary phase presently. The content of our cinema is moving on from erstwhile masala entertainment with poor production qualities to experimental cinema bringing in fresh innovative stories. 2006 was a year of transition for Bollywood with movies like Rang De Basanti, Iqbal, Khosla ka Ghosla, Woh Lamhe and Being Cyrus making daring experiments and succeeding. Even masala entertainment was executed with a class, hitherto unknown, in Don, Gangster, Zinda and the very successful Lage Raho Munnabhai.The year 2007 looks absymal with a bunch of croppers, which though charading a fresh outlook, suffer from creative ineptness to the core. Hattrick belongs to such a category.
Hattrick is opportunistic cinema at its worst. Opportunistic because it seems the only reason for its existence is to cash in on the World Cup craze. It features three distinct story lines with the characters having some sort of a rendezvous with our national passion: Cricket. So far so good. One of the story lines has Kunal Kapoor and Rimi Sen playing a newly married couple for which cricket proves to be a thorn in their blooming relationship. Most of the time this track starts off with a non-sensical song and dance routine which is jarring. The humor element in this particular story falls flat apart from a couple of witticisms here and there. Kunal Kapoor is completely ill at ease in his role of a cricket crazed husband though Rimi Sen lends on the requisite oomph to her role.
The second track features Nana patekar as a dead pan and emotionless doctor which recieves a cheerful Robin Williamesque patient who is a forgotten cricket hero, played by Danny Dengzongpa who teaches the doctor a few lessons of the human heart. Where Munnabhai as a doctor absolutely thrilled us with his antics, Danny is completely over the top and utterly unconvincing. The jokes are flat and there is a forced and unsuccessful attempt at developing an emotional hook amongst the viewer (the teary eyed attendant, the love angle between the interns and the aloof husband angle).
By far the most convincing, albeit cliched, is the third track featuring an affective performance by Parel Rawal as a janitor at a British airport desperately waiting to realize his Britannia dream with a formal UK Citizenship.
The movie is an emotional drama rather than a comic caper as painted by the advertisements. The movie is completely undone by the lack of focus, poor script and defused dialogues which turns it into an exceptionally painful watching experience. I could almost visualize how this particular movie would have taken off. The producer and director would have huddled together to cash in on a world cup movie. Out of the box thinking would have produced a word “Hat trick”. Lo! the idea of three stories would have originated and well the rest of the movie, as they say, is history ( pun intended)
