This time titled This Day That Drivel, Subhash K Jha looks back at Emraan Hashmi’s The Train, which released in 2007.
Not to be mistaken with 1970’s Rajesh Khanna-Nanda murder mystery, The Train co-directors Raksha Mistry and Hasnain Hyderabadwala, to whom goes the dubious distinction of being the only directorial duo of Bollywood after Abbas-Mustan , don’t just rip off the fast-paced 2005 loco-motivated thriller Derailed directed by Mikael Håfström and starting Clive Owen and Jennifer Anniston, about the price an adulterous man must pay for biting into the forbidden fruit.
They turn it into a mushy-mushy rush-rush job where the film editor seems as much in a hurry as the commuters in the Thai subway that houses this thriller’s non-existent thrills. Trust me, Geeta Basra playing Jennifer Aniston’s role is quite a jolt. She pouts preens and poses as though Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction has suddenly got too close for comfort.
And Emran Hashmi as Michael Douglas from Fatal Attraction is a fatal aberration. Hashmi’s titillating trangressions are the stuff that Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema are made of. And yet—here lies the deception—the very idea of placing Hashmi at the vortex of a lustful infidelity is not temptation enough to sit through this stilted rip-off of what was at best, a passably puerile thriller.
It’s one thing for Shekhar Kapoor to sublimate Man Woman & Child by making it into the resplendently emotional Masoom. Mistry and Hyderabadwala heat up the cold warmth of the Hollywood film into a mockery of all definitions of life, love marriage, and lust in cinema. The Thai setting hardly helps to pump up the anaemic adrenaline. It only heightens the queasy feeling of watching a bad Hollywood thriller vandalized by people who don’t seem to have one original, let alone inspiring, bone in their creative body.
In the absence of an inner conviction the narration moves at a scratch-level creating scenes from a broken marriage whose splinters pierce the plot with agonizing selfconsciousness.
K.Raj Kumar wields the camera as though Bangkok was an overgrown shopping mall. The film wears an over-ripened decadent look suggesting forbidden pleasures that can be had for a price in any respectable massage pleasure.
If you really want to know why modern marriages are falling apart , don’t look for answers in this unfaithful adaptation of a foreign film on unfaithfulness. Watch Anurag Basu’s Metro instead. But if you really want to know what’s wrong with Hollywood rip-off-ed Hindi films, go see The Train. A more bogus ride on celluloid would be difficult to obtain.
Tagline for this, ha ha, thriller. “Some Lines Should Never Be Crossed”….Hmmm, sounds familiar . Wasn’t that the tagline for the 2005 cheesy downmarket Jennifer Aniston-Clive Owen thriller Derailed?? Even the poster blurb was ripped off. Adultery be damned.
