"8x10 Tasveer" Movie Review

8x10 Tasveer:

Cast:
Akshay Kumar,
Ayesha Takia,
Javed Jaafery,
Sharmila Tagore,
Girish Karnad,
Anant Mahadevan,
Benjamin Gilani

Director: Nagesh Kukunoor

Music: Salim-Sulaiman, Bohemia

"8x10 Tasveer" Movie Review:

Indian directors would make something like that. Well, Nagesh Kukunoor just did that! 8X10 Tasveer is what you wished for. But then, that could also be the weak link of the movie.

To start with, this is a story of Jai Puri (Akshay Kumar) who works for wildlife conservation and wants to stay away from his dad’s capitalist business. He is gifted with a psychic ability to look into the past of a person’s life through any photograph of that person. However, there is a catch – doing that endangers his own life. Jai’s father dies of heart attack and he suspects foul play. Hence, he undertakes a journey to find out how his father was killed. To his help he has a photograph, which was taken minutes before his father’s death, and he has a private detective Happi (Javed Jaafery).

Nagesh weaves in chilling suspense into the circumstances with a great screenplay. He is helped by good background music and excellent cinematography. The dialogues are just about human and very day to day, making the film real even during unreal situations. He also uses special effects well in the narration.

There is a problem though. No convincing explanation is given as to why the murderer kills so many people. There is some background shown, but that does not seem ground enough to kill people.

The film completely belongs to Akshay Kumar. He delivers something unseen from him before. When the actor had told in a recent interview that Nagesh didn’t allow him to do what he usually does, we should have got the hint. 8X10 Tasveer is a rare occasion when Akshay underplays his character. And while you think Ayesha Takia would have nothing to do, she delivers a punch too with a solid role. The scene stealer here is, however, Javed Jaafery who perfects his Hyderabadi accent and OCD to clean anything on sight. The rest of the cast fall in well.

Overall, 8X10 Tasveer is simple, subtle, smart and sleek. Nagesh Kukunoor does well in restricting any kind of melodrama that usually creeps into regular Indian movies. The movie easily shows his capability to handle the genre after handling emotional dramas well in his previous movies. But as pointed out in the very first paragraph, this could very well be the pitfall of the movie. Extremely non-Bollywood treatment may alienate this film from the masses. But people who are exposed to Hollywood at a greater level will lap this as one good suspense thriller.

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