by Subhash K Jha

Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Bhoomika Chawla, Aryeman, Sushant Singh, Nandini, Shernaz Patel
Directed by Rajkumar Santoshi
Rating: **

Family ties, family sighs....family screams. This is a film that promises plenty of punches...and delivers quite a few, though not necessarily as and when you'd expect them.

Though certainly not among Rajkumar Santoshi's best(namely Ghayal, Ghatak, Damini and Lajja) Family comes up with a slyly scripted actioner (Shridhar Raghavan/Rajkumar Santoshi) that turns the tables on the crime perpetrators of the world.

What if the world's biggest gangster(and you know how big he gets if he's played by the Bachchan!) suddenly finds his match in a common man?

Having committed the most horrific acts of international terrorism Viren Sahai (Bachchan) discovers that his family is kidnapped.

We know what the film's awesome villain doesn't. His family is whisked away by young Aryan(debutant Aryeman) and his friends(reminiscent of Sunny Deol and the jing-bang in Santoshi's first film Ghayal). Aryan has an axe to grind. His hero, his brother Shekhar(Akshay Kumar) is snuffed out in a brilliantly orchestrated car-park shoot-out.

From there, the plot winds its way through a galloping pace. The narrative energy is undeniable. So's Santoshi's trademark mood of clenched tension that is scattered all over the film, though in no particular rhythm of expectancy.

The storytelling is often imbalanced. Santoshi's keeps jumping into a beehive of activities. This time he doesn't always emerge with a coherently designed pastiche of anger and catharsis.

And though Abbas Ali Moghal's stunts are riveting they lack the electric immediacy of what we saw in Santoshi's Khakee.

Amitabh Bachchan in yet another towering performance, rides the film's improbabilities and unnecessary jump-cuts, creating what could comfortably be dubbed his most grey character ever.

The dubbing, though, leaves much to be desired. At places where the original soundtrack has been retained the Bachchan baritone is indecipherable. Elsewhere his original voice has been clumsily matched by a mimic artiste.

But you cannot re-do Bachchan's baritone without undoing it....The uneven voice quality nothwithstanding the narrative just swims the smoggy suburban skyline, creating a world as Shakespearean as it is contemporary in its moral murkiness.

The end-game where the gang-lord comes face to face with the harsh reality of his family life gone to waste is peerless.

Whether it's a twitch of his lips(conveying the movements of a man with a cigar even when the darned thing isn't in his mouth) or his anguished regret at having lost his family for a precious kingdom, Bachchan blows the screen apart. Akshay Kumar's lighter moments at the outset again show the hand of a director who knows how to get stars to look exciting on screen. For some strange reason, the supporting cast is not used to the optimum by the director. A talented actress like Shernaz Patel is completely wasted in the archetypal. role of AB's morally upright wife.

There's a sense of hastened narration this time, not to be seen in the director's previous films. The frenetic pace often sacrifices the lucidity that one would expect in a Santoshi creation.

The selfconsciously peppy songs and over-emphasized background score(Ram Sampat) could have avoided being so predicatble.

And really...is the debutant hero Aryeman capable of shouldering the whole film on his broad but insipid shoulders?

Finally what you come away with is the Bachchan....once again towering above all as the vain and arrogant ganglord who learns a thing or two about family ties....the hard way.