PAR Review

Ek Villain:

Rating: 3.1/5

Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Shraddha Kapoor, Riteish Deshmukh, Aamna Sharif

Direction: Mohit Suri

Genre: Romance

Duration: 2 hours 10 minutes

Story: When Guru's love Aisha is threatened by Rakesh, a villain, the evil within him resurfaces. He too bays for blood and how.

Review: Guru (Sidharth) is a gangster who is happy to let his gun speak. Till the effervescent, virginal Aisha (Shraddha), a Good Samaritan, crosses his path. Opposite attract. His gun goes silent as the two of them chase the rainbow together. The texture of their relationship has that fairy-tale quality. And just when they start to build their castle, brick by brick, their life is stopped on the tracks by a psychotic serial killer Rakesh (Riteish).

Guru, who had dropped his gun in exchange for a bed of roses with Aisha, rediscovers metal. Inspired largely by Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-Woon's I Saw the Devil (2010), Mohit Suri's romantic thriller is Bollywoodised for the desi market.

While the Korean film relied on too much blood and gore, Suri's film mixes romance and violence in equal measure, letting the plot meander a bit butallowing for some sharp twists as well. So there are those sweet moments interspersed with the melodious galliyan track rendered beautifully by Ankit Tewari. And there are also those look-over-your-shoulder thrills because suddenly, you have not one, but two villains running amok on screen. The cat and mouse game between the two bad men is exciting. However, there is some repeated violence that makes you squirm and wish that the writer had kept the plot tighter.

Sidharth kills with his good looks and delivers an angry man performance deftly; Riteish strikes the right amount of fear in his maniacal gear. Shraddha is bubbly and achingly beautiful. But the supporting cast should have been chosen more discerningly. Aamna Sharif as Riteish's nagging wife is an irritant and Remo Fernandes as the mafia don should definitely have had more menace.

You cannot fault the scale of Ek Villain or berate its lead star cast. But you wish you could celebrate this thriller like you did Suri's last movie outing Aashiqui 2. This one lacks soul.