Movie time is back after a break of more than four not so happening Fridays. And the dull phase gets over with the release of a new thriller interestingly called 99. Since the story revolves around money won & lost, hence the title seems to be inspired by the famous Hindi proverb called “99 ka pher” which means “the vicious circle of 99”. The movie is stylishly designed with the right intensions of making a racy thriller. But the end result fails to impress due to a slow script and only few good performances to enjoy.
The story is about two crook boys, who earn by creating illegal duplicate SIM cards for the stolen phones. Accidently they damage the car of a big bookie in Mumbai and then fall into further troubles in order to compensate the loss. They now have to work as the recovery agent for the bookie and then go on to even lose a big amount of money recovered from a betting client. So the script has every main character looking for more money to save himself from trouble. Real life incidents of match fixing in Cricket with reference to Hansie Cronje of South Africa have been used as the backdrop of the story. But that too is used in a very tedious manner which fails to excite the viewer in any way.
The movie starts of well, with its innovative opening titles and a well shot chase scene, which raises the bar straight away. But as the other characters of the story are introduced, the pace falls drastically and all the excitement is lost in few minutes. After the initial half hour, the movie takes on to a very lazy path with everything happening in a well shot yet uninteresting way. Only few good sequences are worth watching in this average movie which could have been much better with some severe editing. In fact as suggested by the title the film should have been of 99 minutes itself, rather than going into more than 2 hours. It shows that in Bollywood, we are still forced to drag our products to make them around 2 hours of duration due to the pressure of buyers and distributors. The truth is that, even in this changed scenario, it’s still very hard to sell a movie less than 2 hours duration in the trade. So 99 suffers greatly due to its unnecessary, boring length.
The story is about two crook boys, who earn by creating illegal duplicate SIM cards for the stolen phones. Accidently they damage the car of a big bookie in Mumbai and then fall into further troubles in order to compensate the loss. They now have to work as the recovery agent for the bookie and then go on to even lose a big amount of money recovered from a betting client. So the script has every main character looking for more money to save himself from trouble. Real life incidents of match fixing in Cricket with reference to Hansie Cronje of South Africa have been used as the backdrop of the story. But that too is used in a very tedious manner which fails to excite the viewer in any way.
The movie starts of well, with its innovative opening titles and a well shot chase scene, which raises the bar straight away. But as the other characters of the story are introduced, the pace falls drastically and all the excitement is lost in few minutes. After the initial half hour, the movie takes on to a very lazy path with everything happening in a well shot yet uninteresting way. Only few good sequences are worth watching in this average movie which could have been much better with some severe editing. In fact as suggested by the title the film should have been of 99 minutes itself, rather than going into more than 2 hours. It shows that in Bollywood, we are still forced to drag our products to make them around 2 hours of duration due to the pressure of buyers and distributors. The truth is that, even in this changed scenario, it’s still very hard to sell a movie less than 2 hours duration in the trade. So 99 suffers greatly due to its unnecessary, boring length.
Performance wise Kunal Khemu & Cyrus Broacha play their parts well with Cyrus being the surprise of the season. He looks very funny with his huge body and witty one liners. Boman Irani (the gambler), Mahesh Manjrekar (the bookie), Soha Ali Khan (hotel lobby manager) and Simone Singh (Boman’s wife) are simply fine doing complete justice with their characters. Vinod Khanna delivers a super cool show as the match fixer and Amit Mistry (as the recovery agent), tries hard to be funny (but goes over at times). As per the theme, songs have no role in a thriller but still here we have few of them inserted in the script to make us suffer.Cinematography proves to be an asset for this movie with some brilliantly canned sequences. Especially the well conceived raid scene, shot for the first time in the interiors of Palika Bazaar in New Delhi. The famous locations of Delhi continue to be the current favourites of almost all the directors in Mumbai. While watching 99, you can feel that the director duo Raj Nidimoru (Raj) & Krishan D. K. (DK), had good intentions of making an entertaining thriller, but they were not supported by their script writers in the right way, which resulted in a half boiled product for the viewers.
However, I failed to understand one main point in the narration of the movie, that why the story was set in the year 2000 where the characters didn’t even know how to change ringtones of their mobile handsets and where 20 -20 cricket was not even heard of. The time span gave a very old project kind of feel to the movie. If this was done to incorporate Hansie Cronje famous match fixing case into the movie then it didn’t serve the purpose at all. On the contrary, it would have resulted in a far better and fresh feel project if it was made with reference to the current years.
Anyway, in a nutshell we can say that “99” had the director duo holding a dart in the right direction but they somehow missed the bull’s eye.
Rating : 2 / 5
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