Rating:*
"Do you think I'm a rejected man?" - the villain asks
repeatedly after his true intentions are exposed at the end of this
tediously assembled pastiche of bad and ugly.
Don't know about the poor battered psycho who contorts his face
like his pants were just bitten off by a colony of ants. But this
film sure looks like a collage of rejected footage from a series
of canned films that filmmakers made and forgot to go back to.
The characters don't talk in "Jimmy", they scream dialogues
and matching their screechy decibel of dialogue is the sound of
cars skidding, screeching and groaning in and out of the frames.
"Jimmy" takes us into the kingdom of the dangerously
damned. And none as damned as the audience, which sits to the end
to watch Mithun Chakraborty's son Mimoh dance on glass, in a manner
of slipping.
Mimoh doesn't dance; he glides! He doesn't moonwalk, he trapezes
through a field of corrupted corn planted by a screenwriter whose
mind seems to have stopped working two decades ago.
How else do we explain the crass and clamorous crowd of crippling
clichés, like the over-painted weepy mother, the over-painted
giggly girlfriend, her over-panting suitor, the hero's rich friend
(Zulfi Zayed in the think-less part), the gaggles of villains and
good Samaritans - all crammed in one line of strained vision, which
recalls the worst moments of television from the time when Doordarshan
ruled the roost.
Mimoh gets a nightmare launch worthy of being canned for good.
What were the people behind this film thinking when they decided
to put together a film so tacky and tattered at the edges it makes
a mockery of poor Mimoh's star aspirations?
Director Raj N. Sippy made some engaging wannabe Hollywood flicks
in the 1970s and 80s, all cleverly adapted from American films,
but never slipshod.
Ironically, "Jimmy" rips off Hindi films from the 1970s
including Mithun's gyratory Jimmy-hijinks like "Disco Dancer"
and the Amitabh Bachchan starrer "Majboor".
All in vain. The plot is propelled by gallery of grotesque caricatures.
This is cinema at its worst. Gimmicky and overblown with no hope
for escape because you want to watch Mithun's boy trying to make
his way out of this film with no exits.
Only Rahul Dev seems to be blessed with a twist of sobriety in
the film.
