Director: Ken Ghosh
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Genilia D’Souza, Mohnish Behl
It’s always refreshing to see two young and good looking movie stars up on the screen and better still if they are Shahid Kapoor and Genilia D’souza. With the fresh pair in the lead we hope to watch a Blockbuster Bollywood movie.
But what just happened here-bad script or bad acting?
It’s the usual Ken Ghosh movie, the same youthful exuberance displayed in the songs and dance numbers. Ken has taken up a story of a struggling aspirant Sameer, who wants to cut across the Indian Film Industry and make it big. His journey as we rightly predict sees a lot of ups and downs and he is under the weather for most part of the movie. However, his talent and his killer dancing abilities get recognized one day by a big production house and he gets his much coveted break in a movie. Since bad luck is never far behind, he gets thrown out of his house by his landlord because he fails to pay his rent, his friend who is a leech deserts him and so to sustain himself he takes to different odd jobs. He starts living in his car and teaching dance at a children’s school and also manages to go for shooting. Tina, Genelia D’Souza is chosen as his choreographer in the movie and we finally sit up hoping to find some sizzling chemistry between the two. Once again his luck runs out and he is thrown out of the movie and thereafter it’s about how he crawled right back into the same movie by winning a nationwide contest.
All this would have worked well had Ken not mixed two or three themes together. We were fine with Shahid’s struggling days and his focus to make it big in the movie but what was that about Shahid teaching some unruly kids and driving them to win a contest?
Somewhere in the movie we stop relating to the character and his struggle since the scenes do not draw our empathy. Even when Sameer predictably makes it to the movie and wins the contest we are not triumphant with him, we don’t rejoice at his success as we don’t feel emotional over his failures. However some scenes are poignant like the one where Shahid breaks down when he is ousted from the movie.
The movie loses its tempo in the second half and even Shahid and Genelia ‘s refreshing pair does not pull it up to greater height. Another aspect that eludes us is whether Shahid’s acting skills are on display or his dancing skills since for most part of the movie he is simply dancing and does not in the least identify with a struggling actor.
Performance wise Shahid does not do so badly and Genilia is her cute self but is not given much scope to act. Music is by Adnan Sami and he does not come up with a soulful memorable number
Our final verdict is that Ken couldn’t ‘chance pe dance’. The movie could have been better, the characters could have been shaped more convincingly and the script could have been well written. No one can achieve a box office hit without these ingredients present in good measure.
