False teeth floating in a half-filled glass. Telephone wires coiled around a neck. Bean bags split wide open. Ice cubes stacked in a pair of socks. Cats running through piles of cash. Sriram Raghavan’s (Ek Hasina Thi) Johnny Gaddaar unfolds just like a James Hadley Chase novel, one of the many props which make crucial appearances in this humdinger of a suspense thriller.

He may dedicate this film to Vijay Anand and name it after Johnny Mera Naam but Raghavan’s plot pattern is most Hitchcockian. Just like the master’s analogy of the ticking bomb under a table which everyone knows about barring the five people sitting around it, here you know everything about the heist-gone-wrong beforehand. Just that four of the five people involved hardly have a clue. The fifth guy, of course, is Johnny Gaddaar.

The gang members Sheshadri (Dharmendra), Prakash (Vinay Pathak), Shardul (Zaakir Hussain), Shiva (Daya Shetty) and Vikram (Neil Nitin Mukesh) rake in Rs 50 lakh each for a deal that will double their money in a couple of days. But one of them wants to have the full Rs 2.5 crore booty. Just that his foolproof plan goes awry and in true film noir fashion it all starts falling apart.

It’s not in the straightforward storyline that Raghavan reels you in. It’s in the ishtyle. Right from the Don-inspired opening credits (easily one of the best title sequences seen on the Bollywood screen) to the wrong-jacket ending, the treatment is a total treat. Every murder sequence — and there are quite a few in this blood-soaked narrative — is uniquely handled and has a very matter-of-fact feel to it, never letting the gore get to you.

The homage to good ol’ Bolly is honest and the tributes direct. The gaddaar becomes Johnny G. because the hotel receptionist is watching the “Bol kya naam hai tera” scene from Johnny Mera Naam. Even the background music (Daniel B. George) is delightfully retro in true Kalyanji-Anandji style. Cinematographer C.K. Muraleedharan chews on the detailed mise-en-scene and gives an ominously grating feel to the all-important night-time train sequence.

Debutant Neil looks too good to have his acting taken seriously! And that’s a good thing because coupled with his shaky dialogue delivery his acting ability is a tad suspect. As for Dharmendra, to quote one of the many memorable dialogues from the movie, “it’s not the age, it’s the mileage”. The rest of the ensemble cast is spot on, including Govind Namdeo as the strictly non-veg cop and Rimii as the paranoid cheater-wife.

Just one question Mr Raghavan — if there’s no channel logo in the corner of the TV set, how in the world can two people, that too friends, watch an obscure film like Parwana the same night in their respective homes? For the rest of you, if you have seen the pre-Zanjeer Bachchan movie, you know how it’s all gonna start. For the end, grab a ticket. Rest assured you won’t be betrayed.

Pratim D. Gupta

Life’s cool, but..

Dil dosti Etc — girls, sex, lust, love-making. Things that have obsessed, attracted, mystified, frustrated, challenged boys from the time they become aware of their manhood make Manish Tiwary’s film.

So the focus is on the life and times of college dude Imaad Shah, the observer and narrator. The Mercedes-Benz ka aulad, who gave Yale a miss and joined S.R. College in Delhi instead, life is just dil, dosti etc for him. Moreover, “Desi college makes a man out of you.”

Imaad Shah turns out to be quite a man — really cool and polished with a careless charm. His drawl and demeanour attract girls by the dozen.

Giving the week-long ragging session a skip he earns himself the admiration and friendship of the student leader in college, Shreyas Talpade.

Imaad’s weekly night adventures take him to a kotha and into the arms of Smriti Mishra. During the day he finds himself a new challenge in the form of schoolgirl Ishitta Sharma who plays hard to get.

For Imaad getting girls into his unkempt bed is no big deal — not even if she is someone else’s love. Admittedly, love for him is just a four-letter word.

It is again Imaad who introduces us to the upright, idealistic, romantic character of Shreyas. Though a cynic, Imaad is impressed and surprised by Shreyas’s views on love and life that are so unlike his own.

Shreyas believes in love and sacrifices for love. He is a conservative Bihari who falls in love with an aspiring supermodel Nikita Anand. The outcome of this relationship is predictable but the way Manish chooses to reveal it completely changes the tenor and trajectory of the movie.

It’s not so much the story that works for the film, but the presentation and the performances that draw you in. Dealing in the theme of love, lust and betrayal, in the backdrop of a college election, Dil Dosti Etc has almost nothing filmi about it. It’s all about growing up.

Madhuparna Das