Shor In The City - Movie Review | Tusshar Kapoor | Sendhil Ramamurthy | Preeti Desai

The ApunKaChoice movie review of Shor In The City. Noises in our head do correlate with the chaos of the cities. Cities that house the rich and the poor, the corrupt and the conscientious, the dreamers and the death merchants, the rogue and the reformed. Director duo Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s film Shor In the City is about several such characters caught in the chaotic whirlpool of Mumbai during the 11 days of the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi.

Three storylines run parallel in the screenplay. Abhay (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is an NRI who feels like an outsider in Mumbai. He is attracted to a model Sharmili (Preeti Desai) and has to handle two goons who want to extort money from him.

Tilak (Tusshar Kapoor), Ramesh (Nikhil Dwivedi) and Mandook (Pitobash) are three ruffians making easy money as bootleggers. They steal a bag that, to their shock, contains guns and bombs. Their lives are changed for good and worse thereafter.

Sawan (Sundeep Kishan) dreams of playing cricket for the young team of Mumbai but doesn’t have the money to grease the palms of the selection committee.

The first half of the film goes into establishing the characters and their conflicts. There are indeed some gripping moments like the dud bomb going off, or the three ruffians fiddling around with AK 47s. What makes these moments fun to watch is a thread of humour that runs throughout the film, particularly cracked by Pitobash, who is rough, raw and hilarious.

Alas, once the three tracks are laid out, the film seems to spin in circles, flitting from one story to another. There’s much beating about the bush, but all the slackness in the pace is more than compensated for by the explosive climax that involves a bank ‘highjacking’ (as Pitobash calls it), and a subsequent resolution of inner conflicts for all the characters. It’s also in the climax that two of the tracks meet.

The strength of the film lies in the character sketches that the director duo has created along with co-writer Sita Menon. Tusshar’s character is a man who falls in love with his wife (Radhika Apte) and is reformed into a man who won’t touch a gun and only give “moral support” to his rogue friends in their criminal misadventures. Sendhil Ramamurthy’s character lives off the beaten track and seethes with vengeance. His brief romantic track with the UK import Preeti Desai has been much talked about but clearly isn’t as sizzling as made out to be.

In Pics : Preeti Desai - Hot and exotic.

The real punch comes in the finale when all the tracks are rounded off square and sound.

Performances are pretty commendable, but a special mention for Tusshar Kapoor and Pitobash. Preeti Desai has a brief role. More than her, it’s Radhika Apte who leaves an impression. There’s also Girija Oak in a notable role. Sendhil is just about okay. Nikhil Dwivedi shines in the penultimate sequence.

All in all, Shor In The City may not boast of big star names, but it packs in loads of entertainment and an explosive climax.

Definitely worth a watch.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5