Ambaari Movie Review

Logic please!

Movie Review By Raju Shanbhag

What happens when you take the concept of Ram Gopal Varma’s Road, sprinkle some Gandhinagar emotional melodrama onto it; and twist the wagging tale with a climax that looks like a cocktail of Ek Duje Ke Liye and Qayamt se Qayamat Tak? If you can’t wait to see what happens, go watch Ambari.

Debutant director Arjun’s Ambari tries to give you something different from the conventional Gandhinagar standards, and then shoots itself in the foot by succumbing to scenes and dialogues that look right from the time of 80’s ‘cho chweet’ love stories. To add to that, this bicycle thriller is further punctured by some illogical sequences and an emaciated Yogish belting the living daylights out of well built goons.

But before we get to the postmortem, let’s also mention that the director has done a neat job even with a shabby script. He is amply helped by cinematographer Satya Hegde and music director Harikrishna in his work. But before you lean back comfortably in your chair and start enjoying the work of this trio, Yogish again jumps in the air to bash up the bad guys or there is a sugar sweet dialogue about motherly sentiments and other types of love.

And the bicycle is punctured again.

Ambari is the story of a cobbler who has an intransigent lover in a rich girl. At first, the cobbler resists, but the girl wins him over despite her ordinary acting skills (they say love’s blind!) and her father is as angry as a bear. When the heat gets unbearable, both the lovers make a grand escape on a bicycle and roam around the length and breadth of India, which would put the owner of a Tata Safari to shame. Everything is not as expected as there are some real nice twists in the story, including the climax.

Ambari is good in parts. But its major problem is script, where logic is as unaffordable to the writer as is a bike to our cobbler hero. As if this was not enough, director Arjun stuffs in so many filmy dialogues (Sample this; Neenu Hako hejje hinde hejje idoke jaga sikre nanna jeevana dhanya!) that make the watching so much more unbelievable. Add to this are the perpetually hollering villains and character artists who seem to be determined to erase all the good memories of Harikrishna’s memorable tunes. And they succeed reasonably!

More than Yogesh fitting into the moods of the character, it would be appropriate to state that the character suits Yogish more! The guy looks every bit of a cobbler and even though his style of dialogue delivery reminds you of Vijay in Duniya, he is very good in the role of Dhanu (Incidentally, he is making a remake of Tamil actor Dhanush’s film). If he can work a bit more on his expression, he can be a horse for the long race.

Supreetha looks cute in Satya Hegde’s admirable camerawork and that’s all positive about her in this movie. She has to learn acting and learn it quickly. Cute looks won’t save the day every time. In the role of the drunkard father of Yogish, Rangayana Raghu doesn’t ham for a change, but his role is such that he can sleepwalk through it, even if he is really drunk.

Petrol Prasanna seems not to know whether to be funny or deadly, and ends up doing neither of that.

Ambari is an average film that could have been better; much better.