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Musafir
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'Musafir' Slick and stylish, but little substance

By Nitika Desai
Film critic, ApunKaChoice.Com

When the stylization of form takes precedence over content, when the characters of a story are made to act as if they are sauntering through a vanity parade and when the plot has too many twists and no singular direction, a movie like Musafir is born.

Imitative in conception and innovative in execution, Sanjay Gupta’s Musafir takes you through a journey filled with immoral, money-hungry characters for whom material greed and deception are virtues to be worn on sleeve.

Lucky

(Anil Kapoor) is a man tired of doing shady work and wants to live a straight life. He takes one last con job after which he plans to get out of the rogues’ gallery and make his own place in the world of righteous people.

But luck is not on Lucky’s side. His girlfriend Lara (Koena Mitra) betrays him, making him the target of cold-blooded drug lord Billa (Sanjay Dutt). To get Billa off his back, Lucky takes another drug deal in Goa.

In Goa, Lucky meets Sam (Sameera Reddy), a sensuous, uninhibited kitten who has an idiosyncratic, forever-suspecting husband Luka (Mahesh Manjrekar). Luka makes Lucky an offer to kill Sam because he suspects that she is a loose character. There is also big money at stake.

Lucky manages to pull off the drug deal for which he had come to Goa, but he loses the money while getting away from the cop Tiger (Aditya Pancholi).

Now, with no money in his hands and both the cop and Billa on his trail, Lucky begins to consider Luka’s proposal seriously...

Technical finesse is Sanjay Gupta’s forte and he has embellished his movie with stylish cinematography, overwhelming background music (at times torturous to ears), sepia-toned shots and slick editing.

But more than this, every movie demands a captivating story and characters with depth. Musafir lacks both.

The story meanders too much on the circuitous track before drawing to a rather disappointing climax.

And the characters are jazzily dressed and very much like the ones you get to see in a Quentin Tarantino movie. They walk and talk as if they carry an aura of narcissism around them.

Anil Kapoor is one reason why one can sit through the entire movie. His unkempt, disheveled look suits his character well and he has also acted brilliantly. Sameera Reddy gives a mature performance and also adds for the oomph quotient along with a rather limited Koena Mitra.

Sanjay Dutt must be sleepwalking through gangster roles now that he has played them so many times. He plays the same yet another time albeit with an entirely different look of a druglord who sports a spiky hair, well pruned goatee, smokes cigars and rides mean machines.

Mahesh Manjrekar too catches attention with his convincing act and Aditya Pancholi exudes shrewdness in his every glance.

On the whole, Musafir is too much style but little substance. Whatever substance comes, it comes in the form of a story that looks inspired from the Hollywood flick (U-Turn). Of course, not to forget the raunchy acts of the two hot babes in the film who promise paisa vasool to the front-benchers.

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