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Rudraksh
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'Rudraksh'

By ApunKaChoice Bureau
Film critic, ApunKaChoice.Com

Good and Evil are two sides of a same coin. If good grows in strength so does evil. And there comes a point when either must overcome the other. Mani Shankar’s Rudraksh is story of such duel between the good and the bad.

Keeping this duel at the base of story, Shankar incorporates the elements of Indian mythology and presents it in the slick style of a sci-fi thriller. The end result – a visual treat full of special effects but lacking in content.

Dr.

Gayatri (Bipasha Basu) is researching the esoteric practices like voodoo, spirit possession, magic and healing powers. She seeks to find the hidden knowledge that goes into such practices, the knowledge that cannot be explained by science or logic.

Her search for answers brings her with her team of fellow scientists from America to India. In India she comes across an unordinary man Varun (Sanjay Dutt) who is gifted with special intuitive and healing powers.

Gayatri is immediately flummoxed by Varun’s powers to take away pain and disease from people and cure them. He becomes the subject of her study.

After a few experiments by Gayatri, Varun has an intuitive insight about the existence of a dark power that is hidden and evil. Many questions crop in his mind – like what is this dark force and what is its source. He knows that the force is linked to Ravana's Rudraksh, which is hidden away somewhere, unknown to the world.

This is not a normal Rudraksh. It carries in its seed the powers that can transmute humans into new species. The bearer of this Rudraksh will have supernatural powers beyond imagination. In the language of science, it was a multi-dimensional hologram in the form of a seed.

Varun sets out on a search to discover this Rudraksh and also find certain answers for his own self. His search his into a perilous journey from the most rugged terrains of Himalayas to the mysterious ruins of the legendary King Ravan's palaces in Sri Lanka. But he is not aware of the dark forces, the evil that awaits him.

Mani Shankar deserves praises for lending a technical brilliance to the movie, but he is an ineffective storyteller. The cinematography in the movie is excellent but the dialogues are poor. The editing is slick and fast paced but the script is loose. The special effects, the SFX are of the international standards but the emotive content in the film is not even conspicuous by its absence.

Moreover, the script uses certain technical terms like electromagnetic fields, genetic mutation, thought transmissions, which sound quite impressive but hardly makes any sense to a common viewer. Then there is also a good dose of Sanskrit shlokas and verses that simply go over one’s head.

Apart from special effects, the other saving grace for the movie is the performances by Sanjay Dutt and Sunil Shetty. The two stand each other in equal stead to keep the balance throughout the movie. Particularly impressive are the sequences when they come face to face for the first time and also their ultimate duel in the end.

Stylish but lacking in content.

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