Charlie Ke Chakkar Mein

When an actor who has been the anchor of parallel cinema in India and who has inspired quality theatre in Hindi and English, decides to steward a ‘thriller’ about a missing cocaine consignment and the murders connected to it, you are disappointed.

The entire first half of Charlie Ke Chakkar Mein has Naseeruddin Shah playing the Police Officer investigating this case, seated immobile at a desk and watching ‘found’ video footage of the crime.

Officer Sanket Pujari (Shah) looks old enough to have been superannuated about a decade ago. What we see till the interval is the cutting between hand held ‘cinema verite’ material of a drug deal gone wrong and Pujari at his desk, doing an analysis of what could possibly have happened.

It is excruciatingly boring and distinctly ‘B’ grade in its production values, with a bunch of Bandra boys and girls snorting, fighting and double crossing each other.

In the second half of the film, when Sanket Pujari finally does get up from his desk to walk to his car, there is spontaneous applause at his eventual perambulation.

Then, when we see him change his position once again, lying horizontal on a massage table and having the kinks in his back relaxed by a European masseuse in hot pants, we understand the strain that his sedentary lifestyle leads to. We also realise, of course, that there is a twist in the plot.

The problem with Charlie Ke Chakkar Mein is not the low-budget mounting of the story, but the hackneyed quality of it. It is stupefying that an actor of the calibre of Naseeruddin Shah cannot recognise the absence of quality in a script.

Following his recent performance as the visually-challenged ‘Wanted Bhai’ in Anees Bazmi’s Welcome Back, this film suggests that Shah is turning into some sort of a messiah of mediocre cinema.

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Ajit Duara