LOVE GAMES (A)
Director: Vikram Bhatt
Cast: Patralekhaa, Gaurav Arora, Tara Alisha Berry
Running time: 114 minutes

There was a game we used to play in school. No, not love games. In junior school. When we were really small. In fact, the teacher initiated the game in class. Someone says one line and the next kid has to add another line to continue the story. And it would continue till the entire class has participated in formulating a story so totally random and so absolutely impossible that it would defeat the purpose of storytelling.

Vikram Bhatt plays that game in Love Games. An inaccessible premise which becomes more and more preposterous as the tumbling tumbleweed gathers more and more momentum. This is Vikram’s first 2D film in a long time, taking a break from his obsession with the third dimension and horror stories (only just). But the Bhatts’ obsession with erotica continues, yet again breaking new ground in Bollywood — managing to slip in a menage-a-trois no less.

So you have this really rich boy, Sam (Gaurav Arora, desperate woman’s Milind Soman), who’s “missing something in his life”. To fill the void, he snorts coke, has regular romps with his f*** buddy Ramona (Patralekhaa) and slashes his arms to feel the pain. Ramona is a little more high on life, killing husbands and going to raves. 

The two come up with this ingenious plan — they will go to parties as strangers and Ramona will seduce a random man while Sam will prey on the man’s wife. Whoever gets to do it first — you have to shoot a video for proof and then WhatsApp the act — wins, the big prize being one week’s supply of coke. Achhe din aa gaye, no?

Anyway, during one such love game Sam finds his life’s missing piece — the beautiful and fragile Alisha (Tara Alisha Berry) — who’s married to a wife-beating criminal lawyer Gaurav (Hiten Tejwani). The lady is also a surgeon, leading to the film’s most howlarious hospital scene where Alisha runs from a party to the OT and gives chest pumps to a dead patient much to the bewilderment of the rest of the medical team.

After this, whatever the writer was smoking, the dosage doubles, and what happens next is pure pandemonium, involving real shootouts, fake murders, body swapping, staged accidents and temporary burials. You can never be sure which character lives, but you are definitely dead at the end of it all.

Three stellar performances could have still saved the day but at the hands — rather bodies — of the newcomers, Love Games often feels like one of those para plays where everybody mugs up their lines without attaching an iota of emotion. 

Gaurav Arora has a presence of sorts in front of the camera but is criminally inconsistent, the varnish often coming off to reveal the wood underneath. Tara Alisha Berry is soothing to the eyes, but short on expressions. Patralekhaa, who was effective as the hapless wife in CityLights, is completely miscast as the temperamental temptress, having neither the frame nor the fire to pull off the part.

The best thing about Love Games is the soundtrack by Sangeet-Siddharth, the songs and the background score somehow keeping the dead beats alive.

The man’s directed around 29 films by now, so you can’t really accuse Vikram Bhatt of not knowing how to make a movie. But perhaps he needs to choose a different game to play. One he will play with love.

Pratim D. Gupta
Love Games should never have been made because....Tell t2@abp.in