A movie that not just borrows its concept but also shamelessly copies a few sequences from the acclaimed French-Georgian film ‘Tzameti’ (meaning 13), ‘Luck’ stretches the bizarre to its limit.
A new game is in town in director Soham Shah’s Luck. Testing one’s luck in a casino or a race course is passé. Too thanda. It’s time to put the very life on the line. The lucky one who dodges death gets millions of bucks. The one who doesn’t becomes history. That’s the game the mafia don Moussa ( Sanjay Dutt ) is selling to the world. “Its pure business,” says Moussa, who himself prides over his unfailing luck. He’s the man who blindfolded crosses railway tracks with speeding trains without getting as much as a scratch. And bullets just don’t end up in the right barrel when the gun is pointed at Moussa. Such is his luck. Now, he’s set to take the betting industry to a new high with a game where luck decides life or death.
The players in the game need money for one reason or the other. Ram (Imran Khan) needs to pay off the crores of debt his scandalous stock broker dad left him after committing suicide. Major (Mithun Chakraborty) needs lakhs for the medical treatment of his wife. Ayesha (a sedate Shruti Haasan) is in the game for mysterious reasons. And there are other players like Raghav (Ravi Kishan), a serial killer whose luck saved him from the gallows, and Shortcut (Chitrashi Rawat) who’s in to win money.
The remaining film is just a series of death-defying games which the players are made to play. In between, writer-director Soham Shah throws in some romance and some drama. But the film keeps dipping and touching new lows in the second half. The stunts, the action and the pyrotechnics are too thanda for the generation brought up on violent playstation games. The swimming-with-sharks sequence looks like a bad joke while the ridiculous climax on a speeding train fails to pump the adrenaline.
Imran still has a few rough edges to iron out in his acting even though he puts in a sincere performance. There’s a scene in the first half when he’s walking away from Danny Denzongpa. The walk is so pretentious that you instantly catch it. Shruti Haasan looks good but appears sedated for the most part of the film. She’s a good voice but her dialogue delivery has much scope for improvement.
Sanjay Dutt, the tapori rockstar in a mafia don’s pathani suit, delivers an expected performance, while Danny (playing his sidekick) has a magnetic screen presence. Mithun, Ravi Kishan and Chitrashi Rawat are strictly okay.
The film’s music doesn’t offer much to hum about. The dialogues are not just banal but dumb at times. One dialogue goes: “Jinhe chaand pe jaana ho, woh taaron par nahin ruktey”, when it should have been the other way round. The cinematography, full of speedy zoom-ins and crane shots, is not bad. The background score, too heavy.
The only thing to relish in this plagiarized thriller are a few hair-raising moments. The opening train sequence is pretty gripping. The ‘Tzameti’-copied shooting sequence could have been better.
But there’s no forgiving the loopholes. Guess what? Ravi Kishan who plays a serial killer gets acquitted and is honorably released from the prison just because the rope of the noose around his neck snapped at the gallows. Or take the climax when Ravi Kishan keeps shooting his machine gun at Imran who’s just a few metres from him, and not a single bullet finds Imran. These and more such sequences are a bummer for any viewer who had gone expecting an edge-of-the-seat experience.
There’s hardly any adrenaline rush to be had from this ‘Luck’. The action and stunts are too many, but poorly executed. And by the end, the film is such a marvelous mess that you feel like screaming “God! Iss Bungle Se Mujhe Bachao”, but only end up cursing your luck.
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