Acid Factory

When a film’s best shot is a scene of coastal Cape Town, you know the director should jump into the sea.

According to the makers of Acid Factory, the inhalation of toxic gas causes short-term memory loss so absolute that Hindi film actors can forget whether they are playing hero or villian. That is some deadly gas and, clearly, the screenplay writers have had a few drags too.

The film keeps you largely in the present, an acid factory in South Africa, but inches forward from episodes in the past until you get to the here and now. It keeps slipping into ‘playback’, like a storyteller whose narrative is interrupted by a heckler so often that he keeps starting from scratch all over. This gives you the uneasy feeling of standing still in time, watching five men and a woman scream at each other in the claustrophobic environment of a deserted factory.

The men are played by Fardeen Khan, Manoj Bajpai, Aftab Shivdasani, Dino Morea and Danny Denzongpa. That is a lot of testosterone under one roof. Having inhaled from a gas explosion they don’t remember who they are—cops or crooks—and are trying to figure each other out with usual male aggression. But soon the female hormone oestrogen, in the shape of Dia Mirza, turns up. Memory gradually returns and the violence becomes more civilised. Now the guys know exactly why they are trying to kill each other.

Finally the head honcho, played by Irrfan Khan, turns up on location and gives them all a piece of his mind. But by this time it hardly matters. There is not a single character you can feel for in the film. Acid Factory has probably one of the most pointless and meaningless scripts of the year.

When a movie’s most attractive sequence, repeated often, is the breathtaking sea and mountain view near Cape Town, essentially a tourist visual, it means the director knows his film is not working. The moral of the story is to Indianise a foreign tale, to fuse a Western concept with a subcontinental sensibility. That doesn’t happen in director Suparn Verma’s film.

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Ajit Duara