Review: Ek Villain.
By Tathagata Mitra
BANGALORE: Mohit Suri’s Ek Villain is not your quintessential love story, in which boy meets girl, the villain becomes a blockage in their path to true love, the hero beats up the villain, and then the hero and the heroine ride off into the sunset. It is not even a story in which the hero seeks revenge against the villain who had brutally killed his love, like Ghajni. Ek Villain is the story of two villains, two people very different from each other, but both capable of cruelty, hatred and murder.
Guru (Sidharth Malhotra) is a goon and a henchman whose love for a young girl, Aisha (Shraddha Kapoor) slowly turns him away from his evil path. Rakesh Mahadkar (Riteish Deshmukh) is a henpecked husband with little self-respect and an even weaker backbone. But he moonlights as a serial killer who uses a large screw-driver to murder innocent women to deal with his frustration. In the women whose lives he snatches, along with a piece of their jewelry, he sees the image of his wife Sulochana (Aamna Sharif) who he secretly wants to murder because of her continuous insults, but for whom he also harbors a great deal of love, and simply cannot bear the thought of losing her.
The storytelling of the film is compelling. The film starts off with the murder of the lead heroine as an unknown assailant beats her up before throwing her out of the window. The film then goes into flashback and slowly tells the story of how Aisha first saw Guru being bound and beaten up in a police station and immediately took it upon herself to save his life. These flashbacks are extremely important to the story. Guru’s change from a criminal to a decent guy making an honest living is shown through a series of events all of which define the characters of both Guru and Aisha.
As the film shows the story of the two lovebirds in flashback, we also see the story of Rakesh and Sulochana and their strange struggle against life with very little means, a little kid, and Sulochana’s constant complaining against Rakesh and his lack of guts. Rakesh is also made fun of by his friend and his boss and almost every other person he meets on the streets. At a point of time, the director compels us to feel sorry for Rakesh and his situation, hoping there could be an escape from it for the poor guy. And that is what makes things different.
Bollywood has always experimented with white and black but Suri exploits every shade of grey with Ek Villain leaving the audience confused at one point of time, whom to root for. Of course, you end up rooting for Guru. In the end, you want him to win. But somehow you do not want Rakesh to lose either.
The direction of the film is a novel effort by Suri, making this one of the best films he has ever made. But what stands out more than anything else is the performance of Riteish and Sidharth along with Shraddha, who mainly appears in flashback. All those who were wondering what Riteish would be like as a villain must watch this film to find out. Riteish plays the role of the spineless Rakesh to perfection. Sidharth is no less. His cruelty catches the eye as much as his good. He is introduced in a scene where he kills a young man by throwing him into fire. Sidharth’s performance in the scene is to watch out for. Shraddha as the sparkly Aisha is sure to make you fall in love.
The film’s music may not be great but it gels extremely well with the film’s situations. The background score is extremely alluring. All in all, Ek Villain is a pretty good film in all aspects, and one of the best to have come out this year.