'RA.One' fails to impress

RA.One ¦a super-duper star playing a robot, a mighty overwhelming budget, path breaking (apparently) visual effects, a gorgeous villain and stunner of a heroine, promotions that almost elevated the film to a national event ¦in such circumstances what are the chances of it not being a fantastic watch? Well, surely there are. RA.One manages to stumble and falter, IN SPITE of all the crutches that it has been provided with.

Shekhar Subramaniam (Shah Rukh) is a Tamilian who is a gaming expert and also prefers speaking in his native language even though he is working in London. And he's not even consistent at that -- his romba (means 'lots' in Tamil) becomes ramba and rumba as per convenience. But you are a dodo if you expect consistency from this movie. 

 
Shekhar's character himself is not sure if he is a bumbling idiot or a smart ass. His wife Sonia (Kareena Kapoor) is doing a random thesis on 'gaalis' for women, if you please. And he has a son Prateek, who day dreams about random superhero spoofs and his rotund classmate possesses their teacher's sex tape, randomly like that. Oops did I use too many randoms? Wait, Shekhar develops a game, which has a bad guy RA.One (Random Access Version one shortened) and a superhero G.One (the Good one).

The story gains pace as the team gets busy creating the game and Prateek insists on playing the first game. That's when the gaming villain decides to step out into the real world to seek revenge. A good enough germ of an idea, which is happily killed by interspersing it with below-the-belt humour and bollywoodisation. Some scenes are absolutely unbelievable, like a robot wanting to know what karwa chauth is, etc etc. A revolting khichdi of sorts, just like the spaghetti that Tam Bram Shekhar eats with dahi.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Starring: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Armaan Verma, Shahana Goswami, Tom Wu, Rajnikanth (special appearance)
Rating: **1/2