New Delhi: What would you get if you had an endless budget, any Indian actor, access to the best special effects team and no idea what to do with them? Saaho is the answer. The film pairing Baahubali actor Prabhas with Shraddha Kapoor is a confusing mess of a colossal scale.
Directed and written by Sujeeth, the film follows no story — because there literally isn’t one.
Right from the start, all one can comprehend is that it is all a game of power and money between some super-rich old men who live in a made-up city that is so strongly reminiscent of Dubai that one forgets what it’s called and assume it’s Dubai.
There are thieves, power-hungry estate moguls and the Mumbai police (as always), who are all after one particular black box, which is the key to unfathomable amounts of money.
Everyone is out to get their hands on this money and nobody is as they seem. In fact, everyone gets double-crossed at least twice by everyone else — so much so that one starts questioning why he/she is even watching this film.
Excessive special effects
Apart from the glaring lack of any kind of plot, the other feature that stands out, and not in a good way, is the special effects. It feels as if every second shot is at least 80 per cent fake. From creating entire cities and locales to smoothing and lightening people’s skin tones, the special effects crew is the clear winner in this entire exercise of unnecessary excess.
The success of this film with no story would depend entirely on the actors doing their job and making the film about their characters. But unfortunately, the performances fall flat. It is a pity that they couldn’t GFX some acting into the film, because not a single actor did a good job.
Prabhas looks like a younger version of Salman Khan
For his Bollywood debut, Telugu actor Prabhas sure did choose a big budget project (one of the biggest, with a Rs 350-crore budget), but he chose the wrong one. A decent actor in most Telugu and Tamil films, Prabhas in Saaho turns into a younger, better version of Salman Khan.
Shraddha Kapoor, on the other hand, gives her usual performance — that of a dead cod fish full of make-up. Neil Nitin Mukesh, Jackie Shroff, Mandira Bedi, Mahesh Manjrekar and Murali Sharma make up the rest of the cast, who are easily forgotten, and honestly, should stay forgotten.
Like any good, big-budget film with no story, the lacunae are filled with high-speed car chases and fight sequences. And that’s the real proof that Saaho has no point — it is approximately two dozen action sequences, one after another.
The music, cinematography and editing could have been done by a bunch of college students with too much money and it would not be surprising.
Word of advice: Watch it in the original Telugu if you can — at least the ridiculous dialogues (which were translated verbatim into Hindi) will sound better.
Also read: Amar Kaushik’s Stree: Finally a film where women protect and men get scared