Blood Money Movie Review | Entertainment | Know your city

Director: Vishal Mahadkar

Cast: Kunal Khemu, Amrita Puri

burrp! Says: **1/2

Bollywood believes in formulas and the Bhatts just swear by them. So if it?s a film from the Bhatt camp, you can safely assume that they are presenting a tried and tested story.

Blood Money hardly has anything that you would not expect. Just 30 minutes into the film and you will be able to predict the end. The film sticks to the formula so much that it actually forgets that the audience is expecting something unexpected. The film just plays it very safe.

The story-line of Blood Money is Shah Rukh Khan?s Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman re-loaded and remixed. It?s the same story adapted (without permission we are sure) and presented in a different backdrop.

Kunal Khemu plays a wide-eyed Indian called Kunal Kadam who has landed in Cape Town (South Africa) for the first time to work for a diamond trading company. He soon manages to catch the eye of his boss with his selling skills. The boss tells him that that his willingness to succeed and the fire in his belly remind him of his early days when he was struggling to set up his business in Cape Town. Sounding similar to Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman? Well?

Apart from being predictable, the film moves at a very slow pace. Kunal slowly gets entangled into the web of his boss? business which includes a lot of underhand dealings. These dealings soon assume larger proportions when Kunal discovers that his boss strikes business with criminals and terrorists too. From that time on, it is just a matter of ?slow time? when Kunal would declare war on his boss. Obviously, he did and that?s the climax of the film.

Yes, of course there?s some personal drama in the film. But it is more like what you would see in a TV serial these days. Remember how Shah Rukh Khan ?almost? strayed with Amrita Singh and Juhi Chawla almost left him when she discovered it? Ditto with Kunal. His wife (played by Amrita Puri) discovers that he has cheated on her with Mia Udeya. The tension between Kunal and Amrita peaks when Kunal is going through his worst in office. Of course, everything gets better as Kunal begins to triumph again. We are not giving the entire storyline out because that is the only unexpected twist that the film is perhaps banking on.

Kunal tries very hard to do a decent job and manages it in the end. Amrita Puri didn?t have much to do ? she just had to be either very happy or very sad, which she barely managed. Mia Udeya only had a few anglicised dialogues in the film and she failed to deliver even that. But one thing that was expected of her ? get into a skimpy bikini with the camera lovingly caressing her shapely thighs ? she has carried off the bikini scene with ease.

Every film has some obvious flaws that you cannot miss even if you shut your eyes. In this film, it is Kunal?s ever changing hair-style. If he has, long locks in one shot, he has a short crop in another one. Obviously this film took a long time to shoot and Kunal kept on changing his hair-style through the shooting. One wonders how this escaped Vishal Mahadkar?s attention. The curious case of Kunal Khemu?s hair will definitely not miss you even if you try to miss it.

In the end, the film is a traditional fare for which you don?t need to twitch any of your brain muscles. It is just what it is supposed to be: a no-brainer Bollywood film that tells you a simple, straight-forward story. It?s not a good film but it?s not very bad either.

Watch it this weekend. It tells a story that you have already liked before.

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