Movie Review: 7 Hours To Go
Director: Saurabh Varma
Cast: Shiv Pandit, Sandeepa Dhar, Varun Badola, Natasa Stankovic
Quick take: Horrible Hollywood hangover
What happens when Bollywood tries to make a Hollywood style thriller? Pure, unadulterated embarrassment. 7 Hours To Go is a loud, outrageous but pointless thriller trying too hard to pass off as a slick action movie. The movie starts off with a bunch of masked thieves breaking into a hi-tech building. They're hacking, cracking and running around with guns like a classic Hollywood SWAT team. Once the CGI-driven alarm trips off, the Mumbai police ascends onto the building in a matter of seconds. Better still, the police have a super sniper capable of seeing in infrared and right through solid walls. Mumbai police upgraded to Austrian police standards, 7 Hours starts introducing it's characters like a graphic novel. You've got titles like Quirky Cop, The Villain and The Security as if this were a Frank Miller novel. You wish. Once the plot starts to unravel, it goes from Miller to Abbas Mustan all too soon. The problem with 7 Hours is that there's no bridge between its ambitions and execution. They move in opposite directions, creating a canyon of stupidity where the film literally walks off the cliff.
The story starts with an angry young man type police officer from Uttar Pradesh on his way to meet his girlfriend at the Mumbai court. She's going to be a witness in a high profile case. When he reaches the court, she gets shot in broad daylight and dies in his arms. He gets angry and locks up 7 people in a room inside the court building and takes them hostage. When the police try to negotiate he gives them 7 Hours to solve the high profile murder case. The setup may sound promising, but once you start discovering the motives of the characters you really wonder if they're all on crack. The idea is nice. The game of misdirection is a decent attempt. But once it comes down to Act 2 and 3, the movie just loses the plot.
The most inconsistent part of 7 Hours is that it tries to do too much with too many characters. Suddenly out of nowhere you're given a cuckoo contract killer who dons a dinosaur suit at birthday parties when he's not killing people. Once he wields the gun he becomes a split-personality dope head who can barely focus on the job at hand. It all sounds wonderful for a modern graphic novel. But execute such fancy ideas needs a certain cinematic panache which is totally absent in 7 Hours. The mix of humour and action just does not work out. Every time a character says something funny, they turn out looking retarded or cheap. The two young girls on the cast of 7 Hours both have similar scenes where they show off their bras and one assumes that is a misogynistic attempt to please the single-screen audience.
The performances by Shiv Pandit, Varun Badola, Vipin Sharma and Natasa Stankovic are over the top and inconsistent. Sandeepa Dhar playing the honest investigative cop is good in some scenes, but the crappy dialogue and script lets her efforts down too. The entire cast looks like they're victims of bad direction and worse writing. There's not a single reason why you can recommend 7 Hours To Go. Perhaps if the director had tried not to copy every Hollywood film he ever watched. Hollywood reruns on TV offer better prospects.