Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Sonakshi Sinha, Akshaye Khanna and Mandira Bedi


Director: Abhay Chopra

Ratings: **

When you have an old wine in a new bottle, you need to label it well. And the Production team has been right on the dot with it. In fact, they nailed it by great star cast and following it with amazing publicity and social media presence. After the release, it's left to the audience to lift it or dump it. Now let's judge it objectively for our visitors.

The story starts with Vikram Sethi (Sidharth Malhotra) subjected to a police chase after he suspected to have murdered his wife, Katherine (Kimberley Louisa McBeath).


Primarily from London, he comes to India for his book release along with the head of a publishing house who happens to be his wife. He comes home early as he wants to tend to his out of sorts wife rather than attend the "after party". Supposedly, he finds his wife dead and informs the police. He is under suspicion as the Indian police hold a suspect guilty until proven otherwise unlike the law to the contrary. Fearing arrest and interrogation, he escapes and ends up at Maya Verma's (Sonakshi Sinha) home, again by coincidence or otherwise - let's see. The circumstances are so complex even at Maya's house and again by coincidence, Maya's husband, Shekhar is found murdered.

He is taken into custody and the investigation is handed over to Inspector Dev (Akshaye Khanna). He is expected to crack the double murder within 3 days as it's a high profile murder involving a prolific writer who is a UK citizen. So the blame game starts where Maya and Vikram are pointing fingers at each other all through the plot. There emerge sub-plots within the plot and new characters also come to limelight.


Ultimately, the crime is unveiled twice by Dev... or not, followed by the media frenzy. So far so good. The movie is almost considered to have ended and suddenly a twist in the tale follows with Dev's wife, Mandira Bedi making a dramatic statement about his favorite author in Vikram. The story ends with so many gaping holes and tends to remind of the classic by the same name. The masterpiece of 1969, Ittefaq starred Rajesh Khanna and Nanda and was produced by BR Chopra and directed by his brother, Yash Chopra. There's no harm in having a remake but one has to do justice with it and even better it. In spite of resources available to the team, they failed miserably to match yesteryear's Ittefaq.


The script is not water-tight and anomalies like the criminal calling the Inspector to narrate the story to him. When the investigating agencies failed to record a simple call, speaks volumes of story and direction. This is just one of the anomalies. The screenplay is pretty bad and all the discredit to Abhay Chopra for it. He should have done justice to his grandfather, BR Chopra's great work.

Then there is hardly any music save for the promotional title track which carries original's lyrics. The saving grace of the movie is the acting of Sonakshi, Sidharth and Akshaye Khanna and dialogues which were very sharp and laced with the situational humor of very high quality. Even Gireesh Sahedev and Shankar Yadav were pretty good in portraying the roles of police officer and constable respectively. Mir Sarwar as Chirag, a lawyer and his lawyer friend Shekhar (Himanshu Kohli) is pretty ordinary in their roles but they can't be blamed much as they had very limited exposure.

Watch if you have nothing special to do this weekend otherwise you can watch this on Cable before the end of 2017.