The Film Emotional Atyachar

Rating:**

A bag filled to the brim with a billion smackeroos is the object of desire for several people. Yeah,Emotional Atyachar is one of those.

A sweet little fellow (Tiwari) is bowling along the Mumbai-Goa road in the dead of night. He is accosted by a heavily-injured character (Ahlawat),in need of a ride and succour. They get going,and the clock ticks on towards dawn,and every few minutes,we are introduced to different characters,as they come stumbling out of the dark: a couple of minor mobsters  who go by the name of Leslie and Joe (Pathak and Shorey), strapped-for-cash casino owner Bosco (Singh),his sexy girlfriend Sophie (Koechlin),and another group of hoods led by the foul-mouthed Kissen.

There is lots of banter between the characters,and only some of it is funny. There are guns and bullets and dead bodies,and only some of it is enough to keep us in our seats. Koechlin’s quite a wide-lipped charmer,but not quite as much of a femme fatale as she is built up to be. Shorey and Pathak,those reliable hucksters who usually have no trouble in making us double up,try hard,but there’s nothing in the script to support them. They get to tie a body and drag it behind their jeep,and mouth such dialogue as : “Who’ll block what of ours?” ( a variant of “What goes of my father?”). Really now.

The rest leave almost no impact. As doesn’t Emotional Atyachar,which needed much more imagination to get to be the heist-roadie film that it set out to be: all kinds of tributes are being paid to Inarritu,Tarantino,Ritchie in all kinds of scenes (there’s a board which says Nine Queens,the name of a cult film involving sharp cons and sharper lines). This one just doesn’t have enough smarts.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com