Malang: I watched it. You don’t have to.

I had not planned to watch this film. This was newly released on Netflix, so I thought why not review it. What’s the harm? I assumed. I watched it for you all so that you could make better use of your two hours.

Malang is a story where Aditya Roy Kapur is on a killing spree seeking justice. This film also stars Disha Patani, Anil Kapoor and Kunal Khemu. Looking at the cast and the trailer, I wasn’t expecting much from this film. Despite which, the film failed to impress me.

As expected, Aditya and Disha get to flex their bodies. I understand that it takes hard work to reach that stage. I just wish they had spent some of their time learning how to act. It looked like all the actors were in a competition to see who delivers the worst. It was hard for me to decide amongst Kunal Khemu, Disha Patani and Aditya Roy.

The story has nothing new to offer. The love story between Disha and Aditya isn’t convincing enough. It looked like a story which I could write. And trust me, I’m not good at it. Director Mohit Suri was not ready to go deep into characters and explore them. The motives as to why a character behaves a certain way are thrown at us for the heck of it. Some of those motives aren’t even convincing enough.

The film unravels itself through a series of intercutting between the past and the present. The only reason I see why the film was structured that way was to give the audience a twist. Sadly, that twist was revealed in the trailer of the film itself. So, if you have a habit of watching a trailer of a film before watching the film, you can see the twist walking towards you long before even the filmmaker wanted you to experience it.

To top it all is the poor writing. In one particular scene, a building is set on fire. We’re later shown two firemen rescuing a police officer from the building. Soon as he’s out, the police officer says this to the firemen, “Get it under control.” Why does he have to say that? Why is he stating the obvious? Why is he stating something the firemen are already up to? This might seem like nit-picking, but these small details are what enhances our experience. There are several other such instances.

To conclude, if you have two hours to kill. You could just do nothing instead of watching Malang. Because Malang would bore you.