Another disaster after ‘Speedy Singhs’.
By Tathagata Mitra
BANGALORE: History repeated itself as the Akshay Kumar-produced Fugly failed to receive a good response from critics just as his previous venture Speedy Singhs. Some critics have called it a bad rehash of Rang De Basanti and Shaitan while other critics cite it as a completely misguided mess.
Suprateek Chatterjee of Firstpost writes, “Somewhere towards the final act of Fugly, which already seemed like it was too long, a corrupt policeman called ‘Imple’, breaks out of a locked room in a decrepit old Delhi building. His phone has been thrown away, as have his clothes. He gets out in his underwear, looking hassled, and searches frantically for something to wear. A curious toddler appears and stares with him with a mixture of bafflement and delight. The policeman, having found a woman’s top to wear for the time being, barks angrily at the kid and runs off. The camera lingers on the child’s expression before cutting away to the next scene. This is pretty much the only genuine, true-to-intention moment in Kabir Sadanand’s atrocious Fugly. Starring Jimmy Sheirgill as a wisecracking Jat thulla, Fugly combines the plots of two well-worn films – Rang De Basanti (2006) and Shaitan (2011) – to come up with a higgledy-piggledy mess of a movie.â€
Anupama Chopra of The Hindustan Times deems the background music as deafening, the Delhi atmosphere “syntheticâ€, and the social messages “clumsily tackled on†but still the quicksand into which the four protagonists were sinking, she found alluring. Chopra called the debutant youngsters Mohit Marwah and Kiara Advani as “attractive and competent†but she cites the second half of the film as entirely void of logic. She too found the style of patriotism in this “social thriller†very akin to Rang De Basanti. All in all she found Fugly to be one misguided mess.
Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV has cited that the film “makes more noise than sense.†He found the soundtrack of the film “overwrought†and the songs were “bunged in without rhyme or reason.†Chatterjee found the screenplay “insipid†and the characters “poorly etched.â€
Subhra Gupta of The Indian Express said “Fugly†was drawn from one too many Bollywood films where young Indians take it on themselves to fight the system, except in this case, the results were dismal.