by Subhash K Jha

Starring: Salman Khan, Saloni Aswani, Kapil Jhaveri
Directed by Sawan Kumar
Rating: ?

"You'll die this Friday." No, that isn't a trade pundit predicting doomsday for this hopelessly loopy and washed-out take on the vagaries of life.

That's just the desi Nostradamus, played by Salman Khan, predicting sure-death for the film's pert heroine (Saloni Aswani).

The film's feverish take on the matters of fate is so hopelessly out of sync with the times, you feel sorry for the perpetrators of this celluloid atrocity.

Poor Salman. He's given the thankless task of shouldering this creative carcass. Not one word of dialogue, one frame in the composition of the shots, or one note in Aadesh Shrivastava's music score serves as an incentive to stay put while Saawan Kumar (the Souten specialist) moves from the Other-Woman theme to the Shudder-Woman theme.

At some point in this blessedly short piece of karmic junk, Salman smirks, "Why do you treat me like Einstein?"

Er, fortune-telling and Einstein? A bit far-fetched. Every time Salman talks to 'God' we see a cloud-burst on the screen which could be that popping sound in our head warning us to leave the theatre before the Friday-calamity gets the better of us.

The series of songs in this supernatural bilge adds to the feeling of a director who lost his way long ago.

This could well be Mr Sawan Kumar's last film ever. It's so deplorably devoid of a center that it makes the average Bhojpuri flick look like a Sanjay Lela Bhansali creation.

The two newcomers (seen earlier in Sawan Kumar's Indo-Pak love story ) struggle to look pristine in their plasticity. Salman, the backbone and the nevercentre of this brain-dead romance, looks more real. You can see the actor making a valiant effort to breathe life into the dead film. But it's a losing battle.

The dialogues seem written on the back of chewing-gum wrappings. The pop-philosophy is so laughable, you wonder why over-the-hill filmmakers don't throw in their towels before they are asked to get off.

The fast-fading Johnny Lever and the cross-dressed Boby Darling try a bit of the funny stuff in this stiff-and-stolid tribute to the karmic cycle.

Salman's character knows exactly when and where catastrophe is about to strike. Wish he had warned us.