Movie Review: Wajah Tum Ho

Billed as an erotic thriller, this movie is a hack job on the hacking of a TV Channel. A media moghul colludes with a builder to wash dirty laundry and put it out to dry. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and so, one by one, those guilty of the cover-up are brought to a makeshift studio and put to death. The satellite feed of a ‘Global’ Television Network, presently suffering from low viewership, is broken into, and the macabre murders go live into living rooms and restaurants, much to the ghoulish delight of your average salivating viewer. The next thing you know is that the TRPs of the Channel go through the roof and the owner, Rahul Oberoi (Rajneesh Duggal), becomes the prime suspect.

But it is not as simple as it appears, and Police Inspector Kabir Deshmukh (Sharman Joshi), has his own theories. Apart from this officer – a widower living an ascetic life with his cloyingly precocious daughter – all the other dudes in this movie have women who do dirty dancing for them. Actresses Sana Khan, Zareen Khan and Sherlyn Chopra, operating under a minimal dress code, get down to some serious gyration, and many fancy twirls in bedrooms and swimming pools later, we are minimally entertained. More disturbing is a rape scene, which could have been rated as exploitation cinema, were it not executed like a fully clothed bump and grind from the 1970s.

The makers of this movie discuss the sensationalism that electronic media thrives on, show the gimmicks used for sending TRPs artificially high and describe the nexus between big business, crime and news. All this is fine. But when the presentation tool consists of a loud background score to highlight every scene, a song to indicate the most superficial of emotion, and music that makes your teeth grind together, then none of the issues make any impact. The whole production turns into a hopelessly overwrought melodrama about how middle level executives in the corporate controlled television industry are looking for revenge.

Oddly enough, it is during one of these dramatic avenger scenes that we get to hear two of the best lines in the film; fine humour from the gallows. One of the villains, who suffers from diabetes, is being put to death by the simple procedure of replacing the insulin in his drip with sugar. The female executioner explains to him how he will now go into a diabetic coma. She whispers to him: “this is sweet revenge”. Then she links the in-camera execution to the satellite which will telecast his death live on prime time TV and tells him: “get ready for your television debut”.

The woman is hilarious. But her jokes come too late. What we have in Wajah Tum Ho is a badly executed movie, stuffed with cliches and hackneyed scenes. It is a film that makes soap opera on the hacked TV Channel look sophisticated in comparison.

About The Author

Ajit Duara