The Xpose

A lousy script, poor direction and pretentious settings render this movie a letdown

The high point of The Xpose is an actress falling off the top of a building. The shot is repeated half a dozen times through the movie. Ostensibly, it is used as a rewind device, but by the end of the film it looks kinky, as though a girl falling off a building could be erotic.

The girl, Zara Peter Fernandes (Sonali Raut), is a fashionably-dressed actress of the 1960s. Just before she fell off, she was at a film party where she got into a fight with her rival, an actress called Chandni Raza (Zoya Afroz). We are unreliably informed that this scene represents a heated public scrap in a city hotel between yesteryear stars Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi.

Be that as it may, the 1960s ambience is inauthentic and the movie is one of the most pretentious ones in recent months. The designers have created Los Angeles, not Bombay, and the period setting is shockingly inconsistent— it varies from scene to scene, alternating between retro and contemporary, eventually covering five decades, ending in the present time. So one moment you are in an ornate film star mansion of the mid-20th century, and in the next you are in a song sequence with Ukrainian blondes dancing in the background.

The plot thickens. Did Zara Peter Fernandes fall or was she pushed? A whole gamut of possibilities appear and we run through the usual suspects. Because of his dodgy demeanour, a music composer called Kenny Damania (Yo Yo Honey Singh) becomes the popular choice as killer. Unfortunately, it turns out that he didn’t do it. A movie star called Ravi Kumar (Himesh Reshammiya) is next in line, but just as you start rooting for him, his wooden acting lets him down.

In short, this is an almost unwatch- able mishmash of a movie, and the only thing ‘Xposed’ is its lousy script and poor direction.

Anant Narayan MahadevanHimesh ReshammiyaThe Xpose