Alright…..movie backlog starts to end a bit…..saw raajneeti…..wish I had seen shrek or even satc2 instead!....buri nahi hai, but bahut achchi bhi nahin hai….prakash jha is unfortunately a filmmaker used to a smaller story telling scale….he works best when working with short, concise and gripping stories, without much emphasis on characters, or their emotional development.

Give him an upright guy, a moral dilemma, and set it in a corrupt, violent and volatile atmosphere, and he can and does work a very efficient story.

Raajneeti is, unfortunately, too ambitious a tale for a 3 hr movie, helmed by this particular director. Quite aside from the shortcomings from a couple of actors, who are grossly miscast (kuch to acting talent hona chahiye tha na), almost every character ends up getting shortchanged in this retelling of the mahabharat…..and therein lies my gripe.

On paper, it’s a perfect idea. Politics is any day an intriguing and larger than life canvas…..almost any tale of ambition and power can be told well against this…..
Then you take perhaps the greatest story ever told, the mahabharat, and marry the two….potentially explosive stuff….

But to do justice to mahabharat is not an easy job…..at the heart of it, it’s a story of real, frail people….none too good, none too bad….and a timeless struggle to stand for what they believe in….its impossible to judge them by their actions, since the motivations teeter very close to home….
Any adaptation of the story has to, first and foremost, recognize the need to make the characters strong, well fleshed out, and relatable….a tall order (its not for nothing tht its called an epic, and most versions on the market are “condensed” J)
Raajneeti falls flat on its face here….draupadi, yudhishthir, karna, duryodhan, all come across as cardboard cut outs….singularly unidimensional….inspite of my best intentions, I couldn’t feel the slightest empathy for any of them….felt much like they would have done, caught in a whirlwind of a story with so much happening that there is no time to focus on what’s important….

Lukewarm….and a waste of phenomenal potential…..

Would recommend sarkar for a better telling of a family tale set in politics, and kalyug for a modern day retelling of the mahabharat….true paisa vasools both….:)

On an aside, hate windows’ self editing….karna became karma, simply because the latter is a word they recognize…..dont need crutches to express ourselves ALL the time, do we?? J