EMI review – watch at your own risk
Legal LawEMI’s biggest disappointment is the sinking feeling the film conveys from the start. The flawed script wastes a lot of time setting up the predictable premise that you give up on the movie before it even really gets off the ground. The second half is so disjointed that it seems like another movie.
The movie, or at least the idea behind it, would have been to show how monthly fees can wreak havoc on one’s life. Four people (a flashy DJ, a married white-collar man, a single mother, and a retired father) take out loans and can’t pay them back. The recovery task goes to an agency run by a thug, Sattar Bhai. Like the people he is after, Sattar’s life is also at a turning point. Instead of just minding his business, he ends up solving his problems and everything ends ‘happily-happily’.
Did no one notice the incomplete story or rather the lack of it? EMI tries to skate on thin ice like episodes that are tied together, albeit unconvincingly, by some shoddy acting. All the characters are soulless cardboard cutouts of ‘ordinary’ people.
Everyone makes a half-hearted effort apart from Urmila Matondkar. She is very convincing as the young widowed single mother at least initially, but at some point we see her more with her lawyer friend going from the police station to court and even to nightclubs without a minute’s concern for her little daughter.
A stiff Sanjay Dutt runs through Sattar Bhai as if Munnabhai is showing up to shoot. Rampal is so slow and pathetic that you might end up feeling like you’re being forced to sit through a children’s play.
Actually, the actors are not to be blamed, as the script gives them nothing to chew on. Show off the bad writing: Arjun Rampal is a DJ who goes to meet the top man at a music company and throws in more attitude than Jim Morrison. And then the top man asks him to ‘demonstrate’ his talent and lo and behold, the DJ sings! Then we see all the lives transforming into a song and at the end, the DJ is a superstar! Everything in the movie is resolved (one never really noticed things going wrong) through mere pep talk and that too by a thug who now wants to become a politician. He then begins to ‘respect’ people to get respect in return.
Don’t even get close!
EMI Rating: 1/5
Director of EMI: Saurabh Kabra
NDE Genre(s): Family Entertainer
EMI Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Urmila Matondkar, Arjun Rampal, Ashish Choudhary, Daya Shankar Pandey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Malaika Arora Khan, Manoj Joshi, Neha Uberoi, Pushkar Jog