Hello Movie Review

Movies and books share a very special bonding. Many books are adopted to make movies and why not when books provide intelligent screenplays. We can always look back to Harry Potter series and to our very own Omkara which was based on Shakespeare’s Othello to see how good a movie can be made out of books. But Hello proves quite opposite to all this. I haven’t read ‘one night at the call centre’ and I prefer to stay away from it and rather stick to ‘5 points someone’.

Salman Khan is a rockstar, with his chopper landing in the fields near the stage where he performs Bang bang. It doesn’t take much time for him to take his shirt off to show his abs and muscular body. After the performance he retires to the nearby lounge due to some technical glitch in his private chopper. There comes Katrina Kaif who tells him a tale about six call centre employees and their transition in life during a night.

Six call centre employees work for a boston based company in India. Shyam(Sharman Joshi) is crushed between his professional life and relation with Priyanka (Gul Panag) who breaks up with him and agrees to marry a N.R.I.

Vroom (Sohail Khan) who is a fun loving guy and has a crush on his colleague Esha (Eesha Kopikar). He also likes bike and is always disappointed by the quarrels between his parents.

Esha is a wannabe model and can take any path, either conventional or unconventional to be a model. Radhika (Amrita Arora) who always pops up anti-depression pills as if they were candies lives with her husband Anuj (Arbaaz Khan) and her mother-in-law who are busy suppressing her and tortures her indirectly.

And finally there is Military Uncle (Sharat Saxena), the only old person in the entire bay. He loves his grandson so much that he never fails to carry his photograph with him.

And apart from these six, there is Bakshi (Dilip Tahil) working as the boss and Suresh Menon working as the system admin.

As they carry on with the work in the office, their shady truths, problematic situations are spilled out and in sequence of events; they are left entangled between death and life. And there comes the call from God who preaches them about the life and how to deal with it. The rest is how they solve their problems.

Chetan Bhagat’s screenplay is simply terrible. There’s no common link in the script nor there is something gripping in the entire film. And to count the flaws in the film, it would take ages for me to point out. And to reveal the film’s potential I will surely point a few glitches in the movie. Some of them are as follows:

Salman Khan is a rockstar and he is surrounded by heavy security but why on earth did he not raise concerns when a stranger walked into the room. And neither had he felt the need to ask her about herself. He simply sits there in the couch listening to her tale without even bothering to know who she is.

And the film is based around call centre environment and the movie clearly shows lack of research before the film. The bay where they work looks like a small web designing firm rather than a call centre. And only six people work in a process where the employees are given freedom to break things in the cafeteria or even take a break anytime they wish to. They can even take a car and go roam around the town. I will stop pointing the flaws here and proceed to comment on the director who made our day even bad than those protagonists by torturing us with his 2 and half hour direction.

Atul Agnihotri leaves no stone unturned in torturing you. With such a dreadful direction and the snail like pace of the film, one will surely ask his money back for showing such a crappy piece of film.

Coming to the music segment, Sajid-Wajid made an average soundtrack. Cinematography has very little scope for creativity limiting the horizon just to the call centre.

And now coming to the acting, Sohail Khan and Sharman Joshi were the only two actors who made this movie a little interesting or atleast for me to give the movie one star. Everyone else were wasted.

On the whole, Hello is the cheapest way to reach hell and come back. Beware of this movie and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ek Dum Bakwaas!