What do you do when you are stinking rich and bored with life? Seek some excitement. How? Ask Jisshu. He plans to get himself bumped off within 90 hours by hiring a contract killer for Rs 5 lakh!

Thus begins a cat-and-mouse chase between Jisshu, the businessman with a death wish, and Tota, his pony-tailed, ruthless-yet-friendly, assassin in 90 Ghanta.
The chase hots up with a puzzled police team (led by Santu Mukherjee) trying to trap a man who has left behind a trail of murky murders.

Tota is a killer with a difference. He lives with his moll (Manjusree), plays the violin in his spare time and fantasises about his ex-flame Swastika (she is now Jisshu’s live-in partner and also a TV journalist under pressure to do a story on the murders).

The hint of a love triangle does fuel suspense. But there’s so much of the romantic in Tota that you know he is not really capable of choosing head over heart, no matter how well he flexes his biceps and fires his gun. That takes the sting out of the tale.

Yet there are twists and turns enough to keep you seated through two hours. The lighter moments are a redeeming feature — specially when Tota closes in on him, but Jisshu foils his plan in the nick of time.

The other plus is Deb Chowdhury’s music. Especially delightful is the track where Jisshu and Swastika dance around trees.

90 Ghanta has a smart script but falls short of becoming dark, sinister and unsettling due to poor directorial skills. Jisshu, Tota and Swastika put in competent performances, but that’s about it. Yana Gupta’s booty-shaking act — her first in a Bengali film — also fails to excite. By Yana’s Babuji standards, the Kancha pirit item number is too brief and too thanda, with the camera failing to cash in on the hotbod’s curves.

Slipshod detailing also mars the film. For instance, Jisshu crawls out of bed in the dead of the night and gingerly treads along the railing of his terrace to get a kick out of walking the edge. When he looks down, he sees the road bathed in sunlight!