Samrat & Co

Rating : 3/10
Release Date : 25th April, 2014
Time : 125 minutes
Director & Writer : Kaushik Ghatak; Co-Writer : Manish Shrivastav; Music : Ankit Tiwari, Mithoon
Starring : Rajeev Khandelwal, Gopal Datt, Madalsa Sharma, Girish Karnad, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Sujata Sanghmitra, Shreya Narayan, Indraneil Sengupta, Bhaumik Sampat, Rajniesh Duggall, Barkha Bisht



Take a Sherlock Holmes-esque detective trying to solve a convoluted murder mystery. Now, in a botched attempt to Indianize the plot, add an item number, silly comic relief, a love angle, the supernatural, ghosts being called to speak, really bad and very unnecessary songs, a spiritual baba, a ridiculous fight sequence, some amateurish performances and voila, you have a film that is so badly written, it kind of implodes and self-destructs

Rajeev Khandelwal tries to play a super-cool detective, who, called by PYT (Madalsa) to solve the case of her withering garden and wilting father’s health, sets off immediately, with his Watson (Gopal Datt) in tow. The father, Girish Karnad, is soon murdered and in true filmy story style, any one of about a dozen people could’ve done it.

Overall, the acting, including by the leading man, is below par, quite labored and in some places, downright amateurish. Rajeev, especially, looks completely implausible in the action scenes. There are too many plot twists, too many side-tracks, too many songs and too many characters for the film to hold you in its grip. Copying a trick / a cinematic device directly from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes was in bad taste and helped put me off right in the beginning. The fight sequence at the end probably took the cake as far as ridiculousness is concerned, though there are several other moments which could give it a close run, including an uncrack-able code that shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to decipher and the grand finale, which is about thirty years too late, as far as being different goes

Its been a while since there was a good Hindi detective story. This was a sad, ham-handed, out of synch with the times attempt at one.