All effects, no magic!

 

 

“Aladin” packs in much better punch than its pathetic promos promise, but even at its best, the film is just about mediocre. Set in a fairytale world named Khwaish, “Aladin” begins on a promising note as director Sujoy Ghosh shows off the VFX effects with this entirely computer generated city. But while cobbled roads and castles set the stage for a magical fairytale, “Aladin” changes track very easily and from a fairy tale it turns into a comic-hero caper and then sadly it does the inevitable – it ends up dishing out the regular song and dance Bollywood rigmarole… Played by Riteish Deshmukh, Aladin is a hapless lad orphaned at childhood and bullied into rubbing lamp after lamp well into his college years. Until one day, he actually summons a genie named Genius (Amitabh Bachchan) by rubbing a lamp, who offers him the customary three wishes. He ends up blowing all three of them in trying to get a girl (Jasmine played by newcomer Jacqueline Fernandes) to fall in love with him! Sanjay Dutt plays ringmaster, the villain straight form a comic book, flanked by an interesting team of sidekicks.

Dutt’s buffoonery is engaging, Deshmukh does well in playing a clueless, craftless chap, while Jacqueline has a ravishing screen presence and might give Katrina Kaif a run for her money in the future. Ratna Pathak Shah’s utterly wasted while Big B delivers his crummy dialogues well but then overall, the clumsy and sloppy plot clearly has no traces of any genius in it.