New releases

Disservice
Deshdrohi released outside Maharashtra
IF you are a bhaiyya from UP or Bihar, Mumbai isn8217;t a good place for you. Deshdrohi, which must have been in the works long before the violence in Maharashtra peaked last month, should have been, by rights, both timely and important. But it is so tackily produced and shoddily acted, that there is no danger of that happening: The ban in Maharashtra is only going to get people curious about a rank bad film.
Producer Kamal Rashid Khan places himself in the lead role. And a more unsuitable leading man would be hard to find: Utterly unprepossessing, zero acting skills. He plays, what else, a bhaiyya who fetches up in Mumbai to make a fortune. And runs into a gang of Marathi- speakers who are out for his blood. And that of his fellow sufferers from 8216;Uttar Bharat8217;.
A Dawood look-alike makes the startling claim that he is the one who chooses the chief minister of Maharashtra. And you always thought that it was a duly elected seat. A wily UP-wala politician turns out to be as corrupt as the Maharashtrians, leading our hero to come to the conclusion that it is the netas who are the asli deshdrohis.
An overweight Gracy Singh plays the heroine, who goes around on a motorcycle, bashing up those who bash up bhaiyyas. Wonder what Behen Mayawati would make of this.

SHUBHRA GUPTA

Oh Big Brother!
Eagle Eye
THE question may have occurred to you before: if 8220;they8221; are listening in to every phone call you make, reading every message you send, watching everything you purchase, monitoring everywhere you go, how do they keep track of all that information?
Here8217;s your answer, imagined by D J Caruso as a shiny golden mother computer, surrounded by lots of her mini-mes, and burrowed 36 floors down inside the Pentagon.
All that Intel goes inside this computer, and 8220;she8221; monitors it to give the US Government 8220;credible8221; 8212; give that a wide berth 8212; leads, on what seems suspicious.
One day she gets very, very angry, and as all of us know from Hal 9000 2001: A Space Odyssey onwards, that isn8217;t good news. Considering she can rig almost anything automated, from traffic lights to F-16 bombers to cranes sorting out trash to electric towers, not to mention mobile phones, that8217;s even worse news.
Caught in the middle of the madness are Jerry Shaw Shia LaBeouf and Rachel Michelle Monaghan, for reasons revealed much later. Suffice to say that one fine day, they get these mysterious calls and then messages springing up virtually everywhere 8212; from signboards to traffic lights 8212; telling them to be there, carry something and do that.
8220;Refusal is not an option,8221; the unknown voice we find out soon that it8217;s the mother computer tells them, underlining it with frying up a man with high-voltage electric cables in front of their eyes.
As long as there is a terror threat around and cars to blow up, Eagle Eye isn8217;t the first or likely to be the last film about over-reliance on technology backfiring, and Caruso certainly doesn8217;t let the pace slag. As for plausibility, it would be foolish to seek the same in a film such as this.
However, this is LaBeouf8217;s vehicle, and you have to admit he does a commendable job of it, surviving almost everything thrown his way without letting you forget that he could be you or me having a very bad computer day.

SHALINI LANGER

Fear and loath
The Hunting Party
IN The Hunting Party, a misfired, misguided would-be satire set in postwar Bosnia, Richard Gere plays one of those Fourth Estate burnouts who periodically lurch into the movies. There8217;s the regulation flask, a week8217;s worth of whiskers and the pouched eyes that have seen a world of sorrows, and even more closing times. Marinating in booze and his own sour juices, he is meant to look worn out and nearly used up, punch-drunk on man8217;s inhumanity to man and to woman and child and dog.
Bogie didn8217;t have to work at tired; those eyes were weary in utero. For all his beard growth and effort, the appealing Gere looks like a manicured star whose expensive flesh is regularly anointed in oil and receives plenty of B12 and exercise. He doesn8217;t look as if he keeps company with misery, though that8217;s precisely what his character, Simon Hunt, does. A onetime star television reporter who suffered an on-camera meltdown while reporting from Bosnia in the mid-1990s, Simon now roams the globe8217;s really big horror shows and tries to sell the bad news freelance. He8217;s a stumblebum in the big geopolitical ring, though mostly he8217;s just a reassuring clicheacute;, the good guy gone only superficially south.
The Hunting Party was written and directed by Richard Shepard The Matador, and owes its gonzo setup to a 2000 Esquire article by Scott Anderson. In brief, Anderson and four other journalist pals, all of whom had covered the Bosnian war, popped into Sarajevo for a reunion on their way to some R 038; R on the Adriatic coast. One improbability led to another, and before long the five including Sebastian Junger were mistaken for a CIA hit squad on the hunt for the fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Toward the end of their escapade an American military officer turned to them and declared that it would make a helluva movie, which apparently set light bulbs to glowing above some producer8217;s head.

MANOHLA DARGIS/ NYT

Loyal, not honourable
Pride and Glory
PRIDE and Glory, directed by Gavin O8217;Connor plods across familiar ground. It8217;s yet another movie about the fraternal disorder of the police, in which a gaggle of brothers, professionally sworn to enforce the law and tribally committed to one another, weep and rage and recriminate against a backdrop of urban chaos. Jon Voight 8211; his face as pink as a Christmas ham, his acting in the same food group 8211; is the patriarch of this particular clan, a New York Police Department chieftain named Francis Tierney.
Francis8217;s older son, Frannie Noah Emmerich, commands a rough precinct in Washington Heights. Frannie8217;s brother, Ray Edward Norton, once a hotshot detective, has withdrawn a little from career and family, making his home on a leaky boat and tending to a scar on his face. Frannie and Ray have a sister named Megan Lake Bell, whose main function in this highly male-dominated movie is to be married to Jimmy Egan, a hotheaded street cop whose hobbies include breeding, smoking, football and 8211; since he8217;s played by Colin Farrell 8211; jittery displays of misdirected intensity.
But Jimmy is also, and most consequentially, mixed up in some dirty illegal business. Right under Frannie8217;s nose he has assembled a squad of thugs and shakedown artists who work with the city8217;s nastiest drug dealers. After four officers are killed during a raid gone bad, Ray is persuaded by his dad to head up the investigation, which leads him toward Jimmy and his crew, and also leads to some breathless shouting matches.
Pride and Glory, which sat on the New Line Cinema shelves for a few years, is not especially good, but there is enough rough artistry in O8217;Connor8217;s direction to make you wish the film were better. He has a good sense of the city8217;s wearying, exhilarating energy and an impressive ability to pull off arresting visual compositions in close quarters. Many of the indoor scenes have a raw, dangerous intimacy that keeps your attention even when the dialogue tumbles toward clicheacute;. And the story, while none too fresh has a certain rough potency.

AO SCOTT/NYT