1.5/5 – Rediff Movie Review: Heroine is an unbelievably trashy film

I pitched this film to Kareena Kapoor, India’s highest paid actress. (I naturally assume a script wasn’t involved.) ‘Kareena ji,’ I speculate the director would have said’this film will make you Meryl Strip’.

‘You mean Streep?’ Kareena perhaps interjects.

‘Yes, same only, just with more skin show. So we can show off not just how good an actress you are but also how tiptop your body is. We’ll make you do everything, from playing insecure to bipolar to furious to arty. Matlab Kangana plus Priyanka, madam.

At this point Kapoor, weary (as one gets) of all those hundred-crore moneyspinners that have featured her merely as arm-candy, sighs, and looks over above the fireplace in front of that Asian Paints [ Get Quote ] emulsified wall. On the mantelpiece she spots a gap, a gap just large enough for a National Award. She smiles but hesitates. (She might have watched Jail, you see.)

Kapoor’s Mahi Arora is an emotionally fraught girl from a small town and a broken family, which is apparently enough to make her stand out in Bollywood. She’s having an affair with married actor Aryan Khanna (Arjun Rampal [ Images ], more restrained than ever and frequently looking justifiably exasperated) on the verge of a divorce, while fending off rivals scheming for her A-list slot. (One of these pretenders sics her boyfriend onto a bisexual industrialist in order to nab a jewellery endorsement contract. Okay then.)

Mahi downs bourbon by the gallon as her career nosedives, and despite the master manipulations of a Public Relations shark (Divya Dutta [ Images ]) and the affection of a namby-pamby cricketer hopelessly besotted by her (Randeep Hooda [ Images ] at his most woeful and blubbery) she continues to spiral down into HasBeen-land.

Kapoor acquits herself admirably and while the performance is overtly showy, it’s more than most of her peers can do.

Unfortunately the sheer mediocrity surrounding her – with everyone in spoof mode especially the dialogue writers — never lets us feel for her character in what turns out to be a grotesquely long film We do, thus, feel for Kareena herself. But that was never the point.

http://m.rediff.com/movies/review/review-heroine-is-unbelievably-trashy/20120921.htm#