Writer-director duo Raj Nidimoru & Krishna DK are known for their stylishly designed, unusual but decent entertainers like 99, SHOR IN THE CITY and GO GOA GONE. Their films have never been huge successes but mostly managed to gain appreciation from a particular section of viewers and critics too. However they delivered an awful HAPPY ENDING as their last venture and have now come up with another non-performer as A GENTLEMAN that falls flat despite having a fine cinematography, well-shot action and occasional humour too travelling through various locations of Miami, Bangkok, Goa and Mumbai.
Continuing with the format of tricking the audience showcasing a key character differently in two contrasting situations, A GENTLEMAN gives you a clear indication of a messed up product in its initial 20 minutes itself and then becomes a completely pointless, lengthy and directionless film post intermission making no impact whatsoever. Having a known yet interesting subject of 'A Hitman' willing to leave the world of crime to live a normal life, it actually fails due to its non-actor lead-couple, a poor script and treatment itself which ironically has been the USP of the writer-director duo since their 99.
Running two parallel tracks in the storyline, A GENTLEMAN has an average first half but a completely disastrous second turning into an illogical and low-on-brain kind of an attempt with unstoppable shootouts and killings blindly following the format often seen in films of Guy Ritchie, Tarantino and more. Neither the music nor the background score make any kind of entertaining contribution to the project along with a casual editing. And only action holds your attention well but that too in the first hour alone.
Sidhaarth Malhotra tries his best but doesn’t impress majorly due to the lackluster writing and similar kind of expressions resulting in a monotonous act. Jacqueline once again delivers a hyper performance as seen in her many earlier films. Sunil Shetty returns to the silver screen strangely just for nothing but Hussain Dalal (as Dikshit), Amit Mistry (as Jignesh), Darshan Kumar, Rajit Kapur and Supriya Pilgaonkar thankfully give you something good to watch in their individual scenes.
In all, at one end the industry keeps complaining about the low foot-fall in the theaters resulting in huge losses and on the other they keep approving worthless script like these solely dependent upon the execution that can never be explained on the paper. Moreover it seems the talented director duo are still passionately following their firm (wrong) belief of (an inspired) STYLE being much more important than the CONTENT.
Rating : 1.5 / 5
(The article also got shared in UC-News mobile app in August 2017)
Tags :
A GENTLEMAN Review by Bobby Sing at bobbytalkscinema.com, New Hindi Films Reviews By Bobby Sing, Indian Stylized films made on western format.
