The Ra.One Review

• Spoiler Alert – Duh.

I know I’m not really this movie’s demographic.

It’s made for eight year old kids from Bhagalpur as an upgrade from Shaktimaan, so that they can buy action figures to rub against their sister’s Barbie dolls.

And this could be an awesome movie if it was a spoof – some sort of parody of the crapfest that Bollywood has become.

But unfortunately, they were serious. Now I never do movie reviews, I only do whiny poems and stuff. I don’t have the patience to watch most movies or to write about them. But I’m going to tell you the whole story today, because I’m pissed off that they ruined Ben E. King’s ‘Stand by Me’; and because I have nothing better to do right now.

Here goes:

Ra.One is the manifestation of the artificial intelligence of a Playstation videogame, who is ultimately brought to justice by G.One, who looks like a sexier version of game’s designer.

It opens in the pervy dream sequence of a ten year old kid, where man in crotch-hugging latex suit tries to make it with and simultaneously rescue Priyanka Chopra from the clutches of one Mr. Khalnayak – Sanjay Dutt, replete with Khalnayak soundtrack and cheesy punchlines.

But first he kills three Chinese warriors (Uski Lee, Iski Lee, and Sabki Lee – really, I can’t make this up) whose uniforms are stolen from Ling Xiaoyu from the Tekken Video Game, which is about to be famous in India as the thing from which 50% of Ra.One has been stolen. Seriously, the least they could have done is give the game a costume designer credit.

Oh, and the man in dream sequence doing the rescuing is the little kid’s dad. Who he thinks is a lame coward. This is either a really deep Oedipus complex narrative, or a very disturbing sex dream about his father: you can pick. But since the kid’s mom is Kareena Kapoor, I’m inclined to go with the former.

Also, his dad has pubes on his head. Really.
How that man convinced Kareena Kapoor to marry him is one of the great mysteries in a movie littered with gravity defying stunts and superhero and villain who experiment with telekinesis and touch-based mind altering.

Anyway, the narrative moves on, and so must I.
The superhero and super-villain have hearts, not the blood-pumping kind, but the ones the producers stole from Iron Man. And the video game comes with some expensive accessories: a jacket that ensures that movements while wearing it are duplicated by the game characters, like the kind of thing used for live action movies.

The kid plays the video game on the night of it’s grand launch party, a gently lifted ‘Stark Expo’ moment -  Dilip Tahil dances amongst half-naked girls to promote his new product.

And the kid, Shahrukh’s son – Prateek, I think, they named him – beats supervillian, who swears revenge, promptly comes to life, kills one of the other game designers, and then Shahrukh’s character.

This prompts people to sullenly look out of windows and then do what every Indian in London does upon bereavement – pack up their shit and move to India. Oh, but not after Shahrukh’s character, a Tamilian called Shekhar Subramanium has an open casket funeral. The montage of this funeral ends with his son putting most of his ashes into a pond-type thing, and some in his pocket. Funeral, and Cremation. Multiculturalism for the win.

Fortunately, this is not the most unbelievable part of this movie. You can even believe it when the movie tells you that everyone in London speaks Hindi, like journalists at press conferences and muggers and airport security. What you can’t believe is what happens next.

As super-villain Ra.One begins chasing little kid who beat him in a video game by using all sorts of hacking, and traveling in radio frequency magic, the good guy in the video game is brought to life, since he’s the only one who can fight super villain.

There’s a complicated horcrux type caveat about how they can be the only ones to kill one another etc, but I’m not going to bother explaining that. I just want you to know it’s there.

Anyway, Ra.One chases Kareena and her son across London while they’re on their way to the airport, and Kareena does some fancy ass driving by managing to do donuts for thirty seconds in a Volkswagen Toureg while she checks out G.One, who is a sexier version of her dead husband, and of course she wants a piece of that.

G.One destroys Ra.One into little cubes and then a conveniently passing by road-roller buries him into the tarmac, and then he shape shifts into a heavily pierced punk to get through airport security and they land at Mumbai.

Rajnikant makes a special appearance to show off his sunglasses twirling skills, while G.One has a fight with around 20 hoodlums at the airport. Where there’s no police. And he uses a football as a weapon. Which knocks out 4 grown men, but when it mistakenly hits Kareena it merely causes her to swear in Hindi.

Kareena’s dead husband has a house in Mumbai, so obviously she tells the neighbours that her husband isn’t dead but is just sexier now as the video-game-AI-robot-holographic-image guy G.One. And then she goes to a party a month or so after her husband died, in that red saree. And dances with the robot lookalike. Midway through the song half her saree disappears so you can fully appreciate her gentle flab.  She has to keep up appearances, you see.

Anyway, this is becoming long, so here are rest of the highlights.

Evil faceless villain assumes the shape and name of a perfume advertisement, Pi/2, and thus Arjun Rampal finally shows us his face and tattoos (Agent 47 from Hitman)  He then mind-controls Kareena to pilot a runaway train via old Bollywood staple/Spiderman reference of ‘Break Fail’, and makes G.One choose between saving the kid or saving the hot mom – which the Illegitimate Indian Lovechild of the conundrums from Sophie’s Choice and Dark Knight.

Of course, G.One saves both, and then kills Ra.One (again), this time with Horcrux/Heart/H.A.R.T/Game Apparatus, and then kills himself, because of course as a logical robot he has decided that the world has no use for shape-shifting technology, or reverse-engineering superhuman strength, or flying or wiping someone’s tears and finding out their chemical content (Yup, that happens too).

But you want to know where this ultimate fight sequence takes place?

At an Expo, where’ they’re launching the video game. (But the expo was empty, so I’m guessing the game isn’t that good, or someone hacked it and then uploaded a torrent)
A few weeks after the game’s designers were murdered.
By the video game’s villain.
Who happened to come to life.
And advance technology by twenty years overnight to avenge getting his ass kicked.
He didn’t want world domination or anything.
Just wanted to kill one little ten year old.

I’m sure if I re-read this I could make it funny, or add more commas, or do a little spell-check, but I can’t.
I really, really, can’t.
So I’ll do some bullet points instead. Everyone loves bullet points.

• The only person to come out of this movie with any credit is the guy who did Rajni’s make up.
• Injuries to Shahrukh work exactly how injuries to Will Smith work in I,Robot.
• Ra.One and G.One make the jump from virtual world to real, shoot balls of plasma and fire at each other but die because of a video-game gun and a video game bullet.
• G.One can eat batteries and recharge himself using an naked power cable but can’t tie a lungi.
• The train crashes at VT Station, and the entire station collapses. The whole fucking building. And the train comes out onto the street, where G.One finally stops it. The train is still unscratched up to this point.
• G.One says, “Battles are not won by bullets, but by the heart.’ (Or. H.A.R.T, the horcrux type thing)
• In true internet meme style, hero and villain put on sunglasses at appropriate moments. Repeatedly.

I’m too tired to incorporate the words ‘Chamak Challo’ into this rant, and I’d promised myself I would.