LUCK

Taking a chance on your own luck is passé, betting on other people’s luck is the next evolutionary level. Some people are unbreakable. While others keep dying around them they survive. Reminded me of a Manoj Shyamalan’s film where he narrowed his focus to the physical ‘indestructability’ of some people and gave it a supernatural tweak (others are being reminded of ‘13 Tzameti’, a film I haven’t seen). Soham Shah picks a more general idea of ‘luck’ and brings it to a very materialist plane. The assumption is that if luck can cheat death it can certainly make a lot of money, if not for those that lady luck favours, then for those who spot the lucky ones. The result is a series of death-defying games that could have been edge-of-the-seat entertainment.
Moussa (Sanjay Dutt) lives off his own luck and is a king of sattebazi. He wants to take betting to a new level where human beings are turned into lab rats with ‘lucky’ tags. One of his agents Tamaang (Danny Denzongpa) spots and collects these lucky people while Imran Khan plays a young man with a decent job who needs some quick money to save himself and his mother. He has to resort to theft to get a couple of lackhs but his midas touch opens lottery floodgates for others. Mithun Chakravarty as an army major is very brave but is considered ‘lucky’ to have defied death on numerous occasions on the battlefield. Similarly Chitrashi Rawat’s luck makes even a lame camel win the racei. But the most interesting character is one played by Ravi Kissan. A serial-killer, he’s been set scott-free (‘ba-izzat bari’) because the noose rope broke when he was being hanged (The film cites the law that one cannot be hanged twice!). And then there are several nonIndian participants whose backgrounds the film does not go into (why should we be interested!).

These lucky “victims” begin a series of games where some will be eliminated, literally by death, at each stage. Gamblers all over the world bet through the internet. There are a couple of spine-chilling games that shock and the action scenes are often not bad. But between the action there is a lot of ‘Dus-style’ poor-taste exhibition of the film’s budget – motorcades with flashy cars, men in dark suits and dark glasses marching in slo-mo, helicopters landing on rooftop cafes etc. These destroy whatever interest or anticipation the next game might have generated. And the last straw is the last action sequence which makes you squirm with its B-grade 70’s Bollywood style.
There are problems galore at the level of the script and themes. The very idea of luck is amorphous and undefined. If it just means cheating death, Imraan would not be on the initial list. If luck makes you win money, why are all the lucky people without it? And if it means you are generally lucky, at everything, then there are more questions than one can answer. In any case would you consider yourself lucky if the money you badly needed to save lives, came not through lottery tickets but through illegal means and by killing others? Another big problem is the treatment which lacks the grit that would keep you hooked and makes the film look like an expensive and rigged reality show.

Sanjay Dutt has played ‘bhai’ for so long, he’s gotten numb. He thinks heaving his shoulders from side to side is called performance. He is the weakest link performance-wise and could be the reason why the entire plan looks fake. Imran Khan seems ill-placed while Shruti Haasan looks good but needs to hone her diction. Chitrashi Rawat’s tomboyish act could have been a little restrained. If her lisp is not natural it was done well. So at the end of it the only people who give decent performances are Danny and Mithun and to some extent Ravi Kishan!

After a poor show like Kaal, Soham Shah has realized the importance of a story and a plot, the latter is nearly overdone. But he needs to better his art of scriptwriting. Why else would characters sound from 80s Kader Khan? Characters should speak credible lines instead of churning out bad one-liners with assumed punch lines. Camerawork and editing are good and Allan Amin’s action is on the whole good except the climax sequences. The background score is hellishly loud.

I doubt if Luck set out to be good cinema, but it certainly could have been a decent masala film. The film fails on quite a few counts but it’s mostly the script and treatment that does it in.
- Padmaja Thakore