There’s nothing innovative about Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine. Formulas have a shelf life too and styles fade.

But if Madhur Bhandarkar thinks by tweaking his standard format of rise and fall ( Page 3, Corporate and Fashion) of a female protagonist to concentrating on an absolute decline, he has made some sort of a breakthrough, he’s only kidding himself. This time he sets his story in the glamorous but hardhearted world of show business where the heroine’s shelf life is unfairly shorter than her male co-stars and the pressure to stay afloat is unrelenting.

But Bhandarkar seems so enamored by his electrifying Heroine he probably forgot to say ‘Cut’ during the last half hour, which seems like a never-ending audition of a nervous breakdown making Heroine overbearing, desperate and agonizingly long.

The film ends on an abrupt and futile note making everything that happened before a waste of time.

http://m.rediff.com/movies/review/review-heroine-never-rises-above-the-superficial/20120921.htm#