/> Starring Soha Ali Khan, Emraan Hashmi

Directed by Kunal Deshmukh

Rating: * ½

The Mahesh Bhatt formula of live-in relationships, spintered alliances, disastrous adventures in the Big Bad City and corruption in hyped places, has completely run out of steam with Tum Mile. A pointless saga of two soggy souls caught in Mumbai's rains who know one another long enough to know they are incompatible.

Arth with no worth.

Tum Mile is a dreadfully long pointless repetitive and rambling look at a ruptured relationship between a working woman and a loser self-styled artiste who's ceaselessly sullen about God knows what.

If we go back to the Bhatts' last celluloid sojourn Jashan the struggling musician-hero in that film was no different from the grappling artiste in Tum Mile. They both hate the world for being more successful than they.

Emraan Hashmi attempts to infuse his trite and jaded character with a fair amount of conviction. And Soha playing his trying-hard-to-cope live-in mate comes out with a few moments which transcend the banal script. Too bad the script and direction betray an utter lack of newsness and synergy in exposing the underbelly of a contemporary relationship crumbling under competitive pressures.

Incidentally Soha lives alone in a sprawling mansion in Cape Town just waiting for the loser-hero to move in. Her father drops in once a month. Where is he the rest of the time? Probably researching on how to be a tycoon with a daughter who shouldn't be left alone.

Mansion not!

Director Kunal Deshmukh's earlier film Jannat traversed the same man-woman territory with far more sensitivity. The screenplay in Tum Mile allows the director little room to navigate his imagination in and outside and the marital domain.

The whole blend of climatic and marital disaster falls apart very quickly. The much-hyped scenes replicating Mumbai's monsoonal deluge of 26 July 2005 are clumsily conceived and executed with carboard characters carrying out their soggy karma in a watered-down waste-land.

The waist-deep drama just about sinks to a no-redemption level in a sequence where the director copies a whole sequence from James Cameron's Titanic with a rush of lethal water chasing the couple in a water-tight room.

It's not just Soha and Emraan who get claustrophobic. The feeling of being trapped in a no-win situation never leaves the audience. Most of the time the narrative plods along without energy or drive.

One sincerely hopes Mahesh Bhatt was just going through a bad-hair day while putting together this wimpy whiny plodding tale of two people who deserve only one another.

They are so dreadfully boring from the outside. One hopes they find one another slightly more inspiring.