Nothing in Bombairiya is what it seems. It has enough and more characters, sub plots and back stories, a non-linear structure and several loose ends that one hopes would somehow creatively be tied together at the end. Yet it doesn’t have a plot!
It also has Radhika Apte and Adil Hussain, names one generally associates with fairly enjoyable cinematic experiences – and yet they appear as lost and confused as we are at the proceedings.
So much and more is happening at the same time in Bombairiya, but it never moves forward, remaining stuck in its puddle of preposterousness!
Meghna (Radhika Apte) is a woman fed up with life. She gets into an altercation with a scooter rider (Siddhant Kapoor) on a busy street. An eager-to-help good Samaritan’s intervention (Akshay Oberoi) leads to more trouble as her phone gets flicked.
The said phone has an incriminating video of her that could lead to greater trouble! So a frantic chase to retrieve the phone takes us unwittingly towards a terror plot; a parcel bomb and an encounter specialist on the loose; a politician behind bars mouthing orders on the phone; and a Bollywood superstar having an affair on the sly.
This tangled mess even has an RJ running an on-air contest, and an overprotective mom trying to get her only son married off.
Director Pia Sukanya and writer Michael E Ward seem to want to populate the screenplay with as much as they can to give us the impression of a plot and smart writing. But it’s easy to see right through all these distracting tangents as they pay no dividends and end up in an underwhelming denouement.
The intention probably was to make a comedy of errors about people being at the wrong place at the wrong time. But by the end of it, we know Bombairiya is the place we shouldn’t have been! Incomprehensible and unnecessarily convoluted without the inventiveness to make it an enjoyable watch.
Half a Quint out of 5!
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)