STRANGERS
…. ON A TRAIN …….. NOT REALLY!
By Vishal Verma

Rating:

Same to same as far as the concept is concerned. Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s interesting but largely forgotten 1951 thriller ‘Strangers on a Train’ starring Farley Granger & Robert Walker?

Ditto! The idea and the plot is the same, the tennis star becomes a management giant Mr.Rai (Khoya Khoya Menon) and a psychotic mothers boy becomes a psychic writer Rahul (Jimmy Shergill – strictly okay) they meet in a business class compartment of a train traveling from Southampton to London and exchange murders of their estranged wife’s.

So far the same and fine. After wards, it fails to register any thrills and draws cold especially in the post interval session. Kay Kay‘s involvement with the writers wife Preity (Nandana Sen – well done) is far stretched and when the drama is about to take place you have already counted your yawns. The plot becomes similar and fails to spring any surprises in the end.

There are some flaws in the script like the character of Preity, which is hard to digest, she is a woman who is not happy with her husband but she readily makes herself available to others. Sonali Kulkarni is reduced to deliver 2 lines again and again ‘ hawan hai, ho sake to aap aa jana”.

The flick starts with a promise, the scarcely populated railway platform, and a guy in long overcoat and a hat walks down, boards a smoke friendly train and finds some unattended baggage in his neighboring seat. – True Hitchcock ishtyle but only till there.

Afterwards the debutant director Anand L Rai gets hooked by the splendid photography by Manoj Gupta and forgets to deliver the thrills. Though the movie is well shot and slickly photographed.

‘Strangers’ is a complete stranger to the kind of thrills that the master storytellers like Hitchcock and co. provide. In fact the second half is a ‘yawnger’.