Chamku – Movie Review

Everyone within the reachable radius of film’s hero ends up getting shot. Past the interval mark, you lose the dead-count and don’t care for it either. And the sullen protagonist with his chronic broodiness is no relief to the eyes.

That’s Chamku for you. All lackluster and no chamak.

The movie tells the tale of a Naxalite Chamku ( Bobby Deol ) who’s miraculously saved after a police encounter and inducted into covert operations by RAW and IB (quite a leap from one side of the law to the other). Working for the government, Chamku kills cold-bloodedly. He assassinates the anti-national elements without whom the IB, in all its wisdom, deems the world to be a better place.

So Chamku becomes a killing machine until his heart throbs the moment he sets eyes on a kindergarten teacher ( Priyanka Chopra ) who, too, falls for ‘Chamku’ despite the fact that he is visibly the most unromantic, if not boring, person and his conversations with her are restricted to the mono-syllabic hmm..ha.

Ho Hum.

With the movie seemingly going nowhere, director Kabeer Kaushik (who’s not even half as good as he was in Sehar ) decides to throw in a twist. The plot takes a vendetta angle with the entry of a chubby-cheeked Thakur whom Chamku has hated since childhood.

After that the story keeps zigzagging like the bullets that fly zooming by in every next frame of this grossly violent film. Chamku plans revenge but is dissuaded from the course by his shrewd boss ( Irrfan Khan ) until Thakur himself emerges before him one day.

‘Chamku’ starts off very well and totally grips you in the fade-in-fade-out sequence where the Naxalites are assassinated en masse by the cops. But somewhere down the track the story loses its direction and the vendetta angle takes it further off the course.

Bobby Deol convincingly keeps a singular expression for the most part of the film, but that’s not a compliment for his performance. Priyanka Chopra perhaps had ample free time on her hand that she even decided to do this film. Ritesh Deshmukh makes a brief appearance as Chamku’s colleague who plans to retire from his bloody job but retires from the world instead. Irrfan Khan is visibly uninterested in playing the character of Chamku’s manipulative boss.

All said, ‘Chamku’ turns out to be a big disappointment if you compare it with director Kabeer Kaushik’s riveting ‘Sehar’. The movie’s plot is as disjointed as the life of its protagonist. The songs are as painful as the refreshments bill in the multiplex. The film has some stunning visuals and a few deftly executed sequences, but that’s too little a compensation for the time and money spent (rather wasted) on this grim and slow film.

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