Movie Review: Players

In one unintentionally funny scene in the movie, Neil Nitin Mukesh, who resides in a voice-controlled mansion, doles out commands like Open the door Baby, Play it Baby and so on. As our Bollywood fashionista Sonam Kapoor (who is a smart girl according to Bipasha Basu) enters his boudoir in a skimpily clad dress, she immediately breaks into a seductive dance, which brings me to a dialogue a Russian guy (whoever it is) tells Bipasha, Why do Indians always sing when you feel horny? Or, cut to another gem of a scene where Abhishek, looking at the before and after crime scene photographs, explains that a woman is behind the robbery because the flower vase has been kept aesthetically in the after scene shot, while it was placed carelessly in the room prior to the theft.

Directed by the famous duo Abbas-Mustan, Players, an official remake of The Italian Job, is Bollywood typified. That includes throwing in a few item songs, a bit of melodrama and sentiment, and without fail, a dose of comedy. Seriously, when will Indian cinema leave out such elements and stick to the premise? No respite soon, as long as movies like this keep releasing.

To top it all, the reasons that the makers give for pulling off the daring heist is ludicrousness at its heights. Not only that, Players becomes one rare bonanza where you get to watch two movies for the price of one ticket. But the catch is that you are subjected to the torture twice. Hmmph! Anyway, coming to the story, Charlie (Abhishek Bachchan) is a chartered accountant by profession who also doubles up as a conman. He has a mentor in the form of Victor Dada (Vinod Khanna), a retired criminal who dreams of building an orphanage for children. (Far more worse things are in store, read on!)

When Charlie receives a plan to loot gold worth 10,000 crores that's being transported from Russia to Romania in a high-security train, he enlists the help of Dada to assemble a team of greatest players (or thieves) to fulfill the task. Soon enough we are introduced to the world's greatest team that involves the automobile expert Riya (expert, really? All I saw was her increasing the speed of the train by turning on some switches), the illusionist Ronnie (India's greatest magician who has his own sob story in order to agree for this mission), the half-deaf explosives/technical wizard Bilal (despite his deafness, he doesn't seem to have any problem hearing others, howzat!), the prosthetics guy Sunny (who makes only one mask in the entire movie), and the elusive hacker Spider, whom they manage to trace in a few mouse clicks with the help of Naina, who is Dada's daughter and has completed her Masters in Ethical Hacking. And, they are led by Charlie, who doesn't have any special skill to speak of (probably managerial skills?). All the same, I couldn't resist wondering how come all the best people are Indians.

But I mustn't ramble and get on with the story. So the greatest players pull off some illusion and manage to steal the gold from the moving train, only to be betrayed by one of their own team members. This subsequently leads to Dada's death and now post interval, it's revenge time. Naina wants to avenge her father's death (mind you, she doesn't want the gold) and the greatest players gather once again to repeat all that has happened so far.

In between all this, we are treated to some inane jokes, courtesy Johnny Lever - who appears as the twins Mangal and Budh Chopra (so named because they were born on Tuesday and Wednesday) and Omi Vaidya, still suffering from the 3 Idiots hangover, keeps mouthing dialogues like Aaja meri whale machli, Aur sone ke ande de de. Players, like the recent Don 2, suffers from lazy writing and a juvenile plot that makes a mockery of the original.

That's not all. The film is excruciatingly long, packed with forced twists and the characters are reduced to mere caricatures, so much so that with no proper background to establish their expertise (Bipasha Basu flaunts her bikini body, seduces men and does all possible things apart from being the automobile expert that she is supposed to be!), you really don't care if they accomplish the job or not. The music by Pritam fails to strike a chord  (the track Buddhi Do Bhagwan should have been played to the makers for coming up with this mess?), and the only genuinely funny moment comes when Budh Chopra's wife, who is a New Zealander and speaks only Hindi, invites the greatest players for Satyanarayan Pooja!

Forget the thrills, with a laugh-out-loud morality angle and collective bad-acting from the ensemble cast, Players is one big time cringe fest and a gargantuan waste of money. Watch it at your risk or only if you want to be entertained by its unintentional humour. May the guys behind The Italian Job never get to see this!