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She’s just seen a woman stab herself with broken pieces of glass and then hang herself from the fan. She is shrieking, howling, running around in a state of shock. She needs to be calmed down. Some other hero would have given her a glass of water or maybe a pat on the back. Emraan Hashmi just sticks his tongue out. The audience erupts.
It’s become a bit like Salman Khan ripping off his tee — you know it’s going to happen, just not sure when. Similarly, every time Emraan Kiss-me opens his mouth, the audience these days gives out a cumulative gasp of disappointment or delight. The former when he talks, the latter when he kisses!
And when such liplocking is sprinkled in Ramsay terrain, you do actually wait for them. Yes, his smooch shop is any day better than an embryo-masked giant with creepy crawlies running around the body lurking around some Nandu Laundry warehouse. Ugggghhh!
Why can’t we make scary movies that scare and not actually make us laugh out loud? Ram Gopal Varma once famously said that the audience laughs their way out of being scared. Now you tell us RGV, a man carrying around a water bottle the size of a cola pet bottle in his jeans pocket and mixing it in a woman’s drinking water to do kaala jadoo is scary or funny? Funnier than Koi Mil Gaya’s Jadoo actually.
And why is Aditya (Kiss-me Kumar) doing it? Because his superstar girlfriend Shanaya (Bipasha Basu) wants to destroy her industry rival Sanjana (Esha Gupta). So she lands up at some rundown chawl where a man with mascara called Tara Dutt (Manish Choudhury) tells her the difference between prêt-a-porter and prêt-aatma and before you can say bhoot, the director boyfriend is running around with evil water.
Soon it’s a pick-your-scary-scene round at the DVD library as set-pieces from Ring to Grudge are copy-pasted by the Bhatt company. But all in true Ramsay ‘spirit’. So what was scary in the original becomes a laughfest here. Except the joker scene — no Shirish Kunder cameo, unfortunately — and the flying cockroach setpiece, which actually create the right kind of spook space.
And all this is happening in 3D, which is done well enough. Not the modern usage of it, like a Hugo, but more Chhota Chetan style, with things flying at you, from bricks to bugs.
In such a set-up, you are not really expecting the cast to hit Shakespeare out of the park. Everyone’s as loud as Eden Gardens before the last ball. When she is not overdoing it, Bips has a couple of wow moments, reminiscent of her Jism and Ajnabee days. Things become easy when the other girl is as bad as Esha Gupta. Wood emotes better. And when he is not going Kiss-me Kiss-me, Emraan’s studiously earnest. So earnest some times that you crack up.
It is the Basu body which burns the brightest in the third dimension, especially those long luscious legs. The title song, with all those dole shole, is a teaser for her fitness DVD. But Bipasha’s torrid lovemaking scene with Emraan early in the film is easily the hottest thing about Raaz 3 with the Esha-Emraan chumathon a close second. Those two scenes also bear testimony to the fact that we on this side of the Pacific, prefer our anda bhurji, not Sunny side up.
No wonder the only line that makes sense in the entire film comes from a film producer who says: “Humein Hindi film ki heroine chahiye, blue film ki nahin!” Well, Raaz 3’s producer made Jism 2 before this and Raaz 3’s heroine acted in Jism and Raaz 3’s director made Raaz. You do the maths.
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