Starring: Kunal Khemu, Amrita Puri, Manish Choudhary, Shekher Shukla and Mia Uyeda
Direction: Vishal Mahadkar | Story: Upendra Sidhye
Music: Jeet Ganguly, Pranay, Sangeet & Sidharath Haldipur
So came Blood Money, and also my chance to review it. I decided to watch it first day, first show. You know, like a crazy movie buff! So I did not sleep at night so that I can go in for an early morning show. Left house an hour early and walked for about half an hour because there was a huge traffic jam between Santacruz east and Milan Subway (that’s where the Inox is), so I figured if I walk I’ll not only save some money but also reach in time. And anyways, a walk in the morning is always good for health, so I’ve heard.
I reached Inox before the time of the first show (10 AM), so had to wait outside for about 15 minutes, before the cinema security finally let me in. Rather than taking the elevator, I climbed 3 stories of stairs to go up to the ticket counter to buy myself a ticket. Before printing the ticket, the girl at the counter, sceptically, asks me –
‘Sir, you’re the first and the only one to buy a ticket for this movie. Are you okay with that?’
I ask her what do you mean by “Are you okay with that?”
She says – ‘No, it’s just that nobody else has bought, so we don’t know if we’ll run the movie.’
‘Just give me a ticket and I’ll see later what happens.’
And thus I became the first person to buy the first ticket of Blood Money on the first show of the first day. Voila.
But guess what? Just not worth it!
The half an hour of walk. The 15 minute of wait outside the theatre in the scorching sun (the temperature in Bombay is raising by the day). The 3 stories of stair climbing. And though very precious but still the least of all, my 100 rupees, which in other circumstances provides for my two meals a day.
If you’re still here and reading this, then bear with me some more, because trust me, my suffering is a lot greater for being able to sit through the entire movie and still come out alive than what you might be going through by reading me vomit the diarrheal that I’ve acquired after being exposed to the shame called BLOOD MONEY.
Here’s a little bit of the plot (or should I say absence of a plot). Blood Money tells the story of a simple but ambitious guy named Kunal Kadam, played by Kunal Khemu, who after winning some MBA scholarship in Bombay (India) is offered a job at a big diamond making firm in Capetown (South Africa). He is newly married to Arzoo, played by Amrita Puri, who last appeared in Aisha. Together they move into a huge house and immediately break into song & dance. After the song & dance, we see Kunal getting carried away in pursuit of his ambitions, while Arzoo, being left alone in the huge house, getting lost into oblivion. The story takes a turn when Kunal discovers the real truth hidden behind the glitter of diamonds at his company, and gets entangled in the vicious web of a multitude of crimes.
The question is, can he come out of it clean and stop himself from losing the only real thing that he ever earned, his love, his wife – Arzoo?
The answer is, go figure! If you have nothing else, and I mean seriously nothing else to do and about 200 bucks to throw away, then please, do not let me or my verbal diarrheal influence you and stop you from giving yourself a trouble called Blood Money.
To be precisely honest, Blood Money is the kind of Bollywoodised version of a fairy tale that falls into the category of cinema where the very lack of any purpose whatsoever of telling a story is actually to just escape it. Rather than sticking to the reality and telling it as it is, rather than hitting the audience with something concrete, rather than offering substance of any kind, movies such as Blood Money are just a mere egotistical fart of an ignorant director who believes that gloss & glitter are enough to fool an audience, who is so used to being taken for granted that nobody seems to care that there are limits to everything. There a limit to us for being taken for granted that we will gladly feast on the gastronomically nonsense directors such as Vishal Mahadkar throws at us once every week.
With bad music, worse background score, more badly written characters, awkward acting, pretentious dialogues and the total absence of a story, Blood Money is just gloss & glitter, which fizzles from the word go.
Therefore, I refuse to write anything more in or against this utter gibberish.
Sadhogopal Ram is a Poet… Writer… a Thinker… and a pigheaded ArthÅ›Ästri. He likes to rant on a wide variety of topics, Society and People being two of his all-time favourites.