Review: Rampaat
Cast: Abhinay Berde, Kashmira Pardeshi, Kushal Badrike, Priya Berde, Abhijeet Chavan & others.
Director: Ravi Jadhav
Viewpoint: ‘Rampaat’ is by a long distance Ravi Jadhav’s worst film. It fails at every aspect of story telling from it’s loosely conceived screenplay on paper to it’s fragile plastic like execution of it.
What Works?
- The only positive to come out from this whole unfocused passion project about the strugglers in the world of cinema is a newcomer who plays the female lead, Kashmira Pardeshi. Her conviction is evident even if her whole track feels completely silly and uninspiringly unoriginal!
- To begin with both Abhinay Berde & Priya Berde feel terribly miscast in this film. No way do we feel comfortable to see Priya Berde as a widow from a drought struck part of Maharashtra, neither does her over animated filmy mother amuse us in any way (it instead irritates). While Abhinay feels even more in need of grooming than in his debut film where too he struggled a lot. (The irony is that the film deals with the subject of actors needing to improve themselves before offering their talents to cinema.)
- Usually Ravi Jadhav has a very tight & in detailed command over two important aspects in his films. One is the authenticity in his worlds (whether it’s Balak Palak, or TP series, or Natrang) & other being the smartness to use certain devices in the plot to take the story forward. A lot like Rajkumar Hirani from Bollywood Ravi Jadhav understands pretty well how the audiences react to the littlest of things making them very good commercial filmmakers. In short their films never turn boring! But that’s exactly what ‘Rampaat’ becomes. It’s boring from the very first half an hour of the film. The world building is extremely generic & there is absolutely no attention to detail. It almost feels like it’s directed by a newcomer who has very little understanding of the medium.
- There’s complete confusion about what the film really wanted to be! Did it want to become a love story set in the world of cinema (& strugglers) or a film about strugglers who happened to be falling in love while chasing their dream. It tries to become both & fails at both. It feels like a cheaper bastardized version of many films from Om Shanti Om to Bunty Aur Babli.
- Having said all that, it still has a valid point to make about making it big as actors or stars, but one doesn’t care about it as the journey that lead to it is throughout silly, shallow & plainly uninteresting. (Not to forget the irony when an incompetent actor has been cast in the lead).
- Beyond anything else you at least expect a Ravi Jadhav film to be visually grand & pleasing to the senses, apart from the post film rap song in this department too ‘Rampaat’ is strictly mediocre.
Rating: 1.5/5
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