Daag - The Fire Review

Daag, meaning blemish, advertised as Daag- The Fire - does both, what it means and what it is advertised as, to you. It blemishes your intelligence and fuels your fire of hatred for repetitive commercial Hindi cinema. The corrupt law system and courtroom histrionics is a favorite theme for half the Hindi film industry.

Here is another movie that can be added to that never-ending list. It has become a common practice for every director to say "this movie is different", but this movie is different, not for its cinematic quality, but for its ability to take you to a different level of boredom. It does have an impressive cast, with most of the big names appearing in the star cast. Unfortunately, not a single iota of talent that these actors possess has been used for this movie.

The story begins with a brilliant lawyer Ravi (Chandrachur Singh) ripping to pieces the evidence produced by an unfortunate rape victim in court, and acquitting the rapist. This very scene gives a very broad hint as to how this movie is going to take shape. A hero with negative shades is a painful walk down a beaten track.

Ravi believes in making money and survival of the fittest, and morals and ethics are words in a book that should be chucked away. But, he is a loving husband to Kajal (Mahima Chaudhary) who attempts in vain to make him see the light of the day. In his quest for money, Ravi implicates an honest municipal commissioner in a bribery case. The innocent commissioner is imprisoned and is murdered by the villains in jail.

To avenge this heinous crime, the director introduces Karan (Sanjay Dutt), a captain in the Indian army who is the commissioner's son. Karan gets straight down to business and empties his entire magazine of bullets into Ravi, while he is busy singing a duet with his wife. Predictably, Ravi survives and Kajal dies. This entire incident causes Ravi to go into shock.

The direction until this point was tolerable, but from here on end it just disintegrated to nothing. An identical Kajal is introduced who brings Ravi back to normalcy and also resurrects his morals and ethics. He atones for all his sins, and is forgiven by Karan. All the evil doers are punished and the movie ends.

The songs and music of this movie border on the mediocre, and nothing positive can said about the story and screenplay. Just another run of the mill movie churned out by Bollywood.