Movie review 'Mr X': No X factor here

Director: Vikram Bhatt

Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Amyra Dastur

Rating: 1.5

When you speak of an invisible hero in Bollywood, it is inevitable that you compare him with the adorable Arun Varma (Anil Kapoor) of Mr India. But it is not just the comparison that makes Mr X look like a poorer cousin. If Mr India defied logic (albeit with an endearing backdrop) when he turned invisible after strapping on a watch, Mr X goes a step ahead to defy logic, physics, chemistry and even geography.

The story is about Raghu (Emraan Hashmi), an anti-terrorist organisation officer and his girlfriend/colleague Siya (Amyra Dastur), both of whom are constantly playing with fire in the line of duty. Raghu, thanks to a corrupt system, falls prey to evil officers who try to kill him by blowing up a warehouse they have locked him up in. This happens in the first half hour of the film, so it’s safe to assume that the hero will rise from the dead and here, Hashmi doesn’t disappoint. A charred finger makes its way through an opening in the ground, to reach out to a landline in complete working condition in the burnt down warehouse. But that isn’t the absurd part. Raghu’s friend (Poppo played by Tanmay Bhatt) takes him to a chemical laboratory where his sister gives him a blue solution with a warning – that it has never been tested on anybody and that consuming it could either heal him or kill him. That’s right, they wanted to treat third degree burns with a consumable liquid. But that still isn’t the absurd part. It is the fact that after taking it in, Raghu begins to evaporate in bits until he is invisible. Now if this were a leave-your-brains-at-home kind of a Bollywood flick, one could have let it pass-painfully, but eventually. But the lab assistant offers an explanation. She hurls some serious scientific mumbo jumbo such as infrared, ultra violet radiation, cellular regeneration, molecular disintegration etc at Poppo (who is as clueless as the audience right now) before blaming it on divine intervention. While invisibility is an immediate effect, you find out only later that the solution also makes you a parkour expert, because nothing else explains that swinging from building tops-unless you’re Spiderman, which you’re not. You’re Mr X.

What follows is a chase sequence between the hero and the villains and Siya (who is torn between siding with the her love and the law). Although supposedly “the best” officer in the team after Raghu, Siya’s contribution to the team is mostly to pull out a gun before putting it down and laying out plans that could at best, trap a mouse.

Who emerges victorious after the chase is anybody’s guess, but we’ll let you figure out the ‘X’ in this equation.

We called the film geography-defying earlier because the film changes locations with every few frames, without once taking the audience with it. But that’s a minute detail you can overlook given the magnitude of unreasonable events that occur in the film.

Performances in the film are strictly okay. Emraan does a fair job of portraying his helpless character, but the story is so weak that it weighs him down with it. Amyra lends immense prettiness to the screen, but unfortunately that’s the best she does. As for Tanmay Bhatt, he’s probably got enough matter to joke about for many of his stand-up acts to come.

That the film is in 3D doesn’t mean that it adds any more dimension to it. It is as much a yawn fest as it would’ve been in 2D.