Yagam Review

Yagam, much like its lead Navdeep, deserves much better. An ambitious thriller with the potential to make it big, it falters because of how starved its vital support systems are. The result is that a step away from the beaten path remains just that - a mere faltering step.

Purely intended to be a thriller, Yagam starts off with Danny (Navdeep), a small-time goonda in Thailand, who has a job at the same restaurant as his bartender girlfriend Sophie (Kim Sharma). He is generally leading life on the edge, taking on snake-smooching challenges, getting chased by cops and bribing them in turn, when strange prophetic visions of people getting murdered haunt him.

When Sophie discovers that Danny is indeed linked to all those murders and questions him, he, in turn, accuses her of having been linked to the victims. Danny then reveals his flashback, and to further help us "solve" the murder mystery are two cops played by Ajay and Harshavardhan.

The film starts off with a rather uninviting foreign look, with a massive south-Asian population and obscure urgently-conducted Thai conversations meant to give the proceedings an exotic feel. The chase sequences, and an elaborate and slick love-making scene (between Navdeep and Kim Sharma) are impressive, and you hope the film will somehow live up to the interesting standards these sequences have made up. Unfortunately, apart from keeping you vaguely hooked, there's no brilliance in the script.

One of the main problems with Yagam is that it never really solves any puzzling questions - the two investigating cops only "imagine" what might have happened, in a semi-comic track. Unfortunately, neither is their comedy - inundated with several in-jokes about the Telugu film industry and piracy - anything above insipid, nor is their imagination too wild. The result is a far-from-crackerjack experience as far as thrills are concerned.

Navdeep carries this off well, but only evokes pity about how much of a better deal he could have got. He's good with the action sequence, plenty of hot babes in the songs, and of course, the dialogues - but there's hardly much dialogue to speak about in this flick.

If Bhumika is what you're looking out for, then it's a rather dull time you're going to have to set out for, because the actress has a role that doesn't rise above a cameo. It is Kim Sharma with the real screen time here, and she's quite good.

Rahul Dev as Sanjay Arya, the rich businessman who gets killed, is a garden-variety villain with some equally garden-variety dubbing latched on to him. Ajay and Harshavardhan go down fighting the lost cause of mild humour in the film.

The film hasn't been packaged too well, even given some of the innovative content, and the mediocrity of the technical values shows through. The music, too, isn't striking in the least, save for some racy work during the action sequences.

Yagam is likely to limp out of the theatres pretty soon, so if you want to cheer for it you may just have to hurry.