/> Starring Sohail Khan, Yash Tonk, Vrajesh Hirjee, Amrita Arora, Shiyaji Shinde
Directed by Ajay Chandok
Rating: *

Sohail Khan is an actor of considerable comic aptitude creating pockets of comicbook parody with the material that he's usually provided.

In Team he is stuck with a plot that's pointless, moth-eaten and worse, so anaemic in its threesome-have-some-fun motivations, you begin to wonder why they chose to put this film out as the first release before the strike in the multiplexes ended. Maybe they didn't know better.

Team is like that irksome piece of rapidly-spoiling cake which has been left uneaten on the table. No one wants to claim it because it's been there too long.

No matter how much noise our three heroes make in Team they can't whip up any steam for occasion.

They start off as aspiring musicians living on a rent-free and food-on-the-house agreement with a kindly couple, played by the ever-kindly Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Anita Kanwal...an arrangement you had hoped and prayed to end after Satish Shah and Farida Jalal in Kaho Na...Pyar Hai.

Some things like the rental laws and the laws about kindly landlords(from Lalita Pawar in Anari to Zohra Sehgal in Saawriya) never change.

Hindi films often show distinct signs of immaturity in the way they portray family values. The interweavement of emotions tying the characters together is so amateurish that the bonds beging to break up on paper long before they reach the screen.

The three heroes take on a caricatural don Shiyaji Shinde who makes Kharbanda a victim of extortion. Sunny Deol did such films with infectious energy. Now there's only the futile debris of recalled nostalgia.

The hockey sticks come out, all finesse in the presentation firmly put away. What we're left looking at is a fight between Good and Evil which is not just bland and boring it's also brainless and under-cooked.

The don's character played with nerve-wracking graph-defying gusto by Shinde is in many ways indicative of the film's rapidly-declining interest-level.

You know the director has lost interest somewhere at the very start. So why should we bother? Somewhere along the cumbersome route Amrita Arora pops up as the don's sister kidnapped by Sohail and his friends (remember Minissha Lamba in Kidnap?) to teach the satirical don how it feels when a loved one is harassed for extortion money. Remember Raj Santoshi's Family?

Forget extortion, this film is guilty of much worse crimes against humankind.