Shahid Kapoor stars in Romeo.
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Movie review: O'Romeo
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Triptii Dimri, Vikrant Massey, Avinash Tiwary and Nana Patekar
Director: Vishal Bhardwaj
Rating: 7/10
DIRECTOR Vishal Bhardwaj, renowned for his intense, often dark adaptations of Shakespearean tales in Bollywood, revisits this theme with a script that explores the inner human emotions of love, hate, greed and anger with some extreme violence added.
Shahid Kapoor is not your typical Romeo, but rather a callous gang leader who kills for money. Ustara, who has no respect for any woman until Afsha (Triptii Dimri) approaches him to organise a hit. She wants to get back at the gang leaders who killed her husband of just a few weeks, played by Vikrant Massey.
The rest of the story is about the interactions and intrigues between them and the other players in this international smuggling and repeated murders scheme. This includes top gangster Jalal (Avinash Tiwary), who is inexplicably based in Spain, where he even rules the bull-fighting rings, and takes to fighting the bulls himself.
Also part of this is cop Ismail Khan (Nana Patekar), the only person Ustara respects and takes orders from. Despite the excellent roles of Kapoor and Dimri in particular, the convoluted plot, which is further jeopardised by frequent flashback scenes to explain events, leads to three hours of many violent action scenes, including a rather incredulous climax in a Spanish bull ring.
Rather unfortunately, Bhardwaj also seems to have succumbed to the latest trend in Bollywood of pandering to audiences that demand lots of blood and gore, as well as somehow including Pakistan as the source of terrorism. He does this in an almost throwaway short scene where Jalal’s wife Rabia (Tamannaah Bhatia), without any further expansion of her claim, tells Ustara that Jalal works with the Pakistani intelligence services.
O Romeo is definitely not in the same class of Bhardwaj’s previous hits, although the poetry he writes for some of the scenes is quite good.