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ABHAY
Director: Suresh Krishna
Music: Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy
Cast: Kamal Haasan, Raveena Tandon, Manisha Koirala, Milind Gunaji, Kitu Gidwani, Vikram Gokhale and Raji Iyer.

RATING:
*****

There are times when you indulge in idiosyncrasies. But not often when you are a well-known filmmaker and your last film has been a flop, because of your whims and fancies while making a film. But a man like Kamal Haasan will never agree that he is wrong. Hey Ram did not do well at all. The film too did not get some great reviews.

Abhay also looks like it has been made by Kamal Haasan. The heavy overdose of sex, the madness in making which is so evident with Haasan are major ingredients of the film.

Kamal Haasan is in a double role of the armyman Vijay who and the maniacal Abhay. Vijay is involved in rescue missions and has also saved a lot of innocent civilians from the clutches of the terrorists.

Tejaswini (Raveena Tandon), a newsreader with Star News and Vijay are in love and she gets pregnant with his baby. Thus their wedding is preponed and the two go to meet Abhay in the mental asylum. Abhay has been in the asylum right from the time he was a child, after he had killed his adulterous stepmother (Kitu Gidwani). His stepmom was responsible for his mother (Raji Iyer) committing suicide and also for his father’s (Milind Gunaji) death. She was also responsible for Vijay going away to his uncle’s (Vikram Gokhale) house.

Since then Abhay has a problem against the female gender. So when he sees Tejaswini, he feels that she is his stepmom and tries to kill her. He even kills a couple of his mental colleagues and runs away from the asylum.

Even as he searches for Tejaswini to kill her, he encounters an actress who loves to get high on drugs Sharmilee (Manisha Koirala). Abhay and Sharmilee almost end up having sex, before he kills her.

Then, Abhay tries hard to kill Tejaswini and follows her all over the place. He even follows Vijay and Tejaswini to his ancestral house where he had killed his stepmom. And in the ensuing climax, he kills himself after realising that Tejaswini is not his stepmom.

The subject is very silly. The script is bad and the direction is very poor. The film should have never been made in such a manner. Kamal Haasan should not have played both the roles. While he is very good in the role of Abhay, he is just average as Vijay. The script suffers from severe constraints in terms of the flow.

Moreover, the introduction of cartoons instead of some serious scenes is appalling. The scenes were introduced to show Abhay’s fascination for cartoons, but that in no way helps the film as it disturbs the flow. One particular scene has too much of cartoons and it actually mars the seriousness. Moreover the scene where Abhay kills Sharmilee also has been animated and that again makes one lose the plot.

Raveena is very good in all her scenes and so is Manisha Koirala in her short and sweet role. Milind Gunaji and Kitu Gidwani excel.

But one still feels that we should have had more from Raveena and Manisha apart from seeing their skin. Kamal Haasan should have indeed got a good actor to play the other role of Vijay. The film is so mad that it seems that the mentally challenged Abhay had made it.

RELEASE DATE: 16th November 2001

REVIEWED BY SAMEER ANNIS