Action Replayy

Rating : 3/10
Release Date : 5th November, 2010
Time : ~140 minutes
Director & Co-Writer : Vipul Amrutlal Shah; Co-Writers : Aatish Kapadia, Suresh Nair; Music : Pritam
Starring : Akshay Kumar, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Aditya Roy Kapoor, Om Puri, Kirron Kher, Neha Dhupia, Rannvijay Singh, Rajpal Yadav, Sudeepa Singh

Take "Back to The Future" (a classic). Attempt Indianisation via heavy dollops of unwanted emotion, inane dialogue, silly characters, logical flaws and a ludicrous ending. And you get some idea of the angst I feel after having watched this film.


Aditya doesn’t want to get married to his girlfriend as he feels marriage leads to terrible things. Case in point are his constantly bickering parents, Akshay & Aishwarya. However, when on their 35th wedding anniversary they seem to be on the verge of splitting up, he suddenly cannot digest it, he rushes to his girlfriends grandfather’s place, gets into his time machine and travels back in time to try and make sure they love each other when they get married. Sounds illogical ? It is…


All characters are shallow, a horrible stereotype without any depth or likeability. Each person seems to be wearing floral, psychedelic colours and were denims even in existence in India in 1975 ? The shoddy animation in the beginning and slapstick ending ruins the film completely and the rather simple plot is stretched and stretched till our sanity is close to breaking point.


There is too much emphasis on looks, camera angles and clothing rather than the script. In the edit (quite a few jumpy cuts in the film, BTW) they seem to have forgotten simple things like what is it that Aditya tells his parents & grandparents to become friends with them and start living with them ? At the end there is a reference from each of the grandparents, while bidding goodbye to Aditya, saying they will miss him, miss his constant compliments but we never saw him interact with them or compliment them !

Akshay’s transformation was mildly interesting though his overall look was terrible. Aishwarya’s make-up looked odd but still looked good. And while Aditya showed some breeziness, the film struggles as a whole, purely due to script and edit issues. Neha looked good.


The sad part about this film is that with a little more effort, it could’ve been brilliant. In its current form, it is highly irritating…its a shame that 25 years after Back to The Future we werent able to make a film that could even come close...time for me to do some time travel and watch it again !