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By Joginder Tuteja, July 28, 2009 - 11:56 IST
MOVIE DETAILS
Cast: Amarjeet Shukla, Tulip Joshi, Lucky Ali, Deepal Shaw, Shahwar Ali, Sharat Saxena
Director: Suniel-Praful
Producer: Reeta J Shukla
Music: Shamir Tandon
Lyrics: Shabbir Ahmed
THE FILM
These are hero's shades. Freeze frame. These are hero's ear rings. Freeze frame. This is hero's envelope. Freeze frame. This is villain's revolver. Jump cut. This is heroine's belt. Freeze frame. This is vamp's swimming pool. Freeze frame. That's the chase on the road. Jump cut. That's our hero walking down to the villain's den. Jump cut. It can't be more exasperating to see an entire film flip-flopping between freeze frames and jump cuts with that noisy and screechy sound design and background score making things work.
Runway sets the message right at the very beginning that it is an exercise in futility. Amarjeet Shukla, the lead protagonist in the film, becomes a contract killer to save the life of his lady love Deepal Shaw, who is dying due to drug usage. He comes in touch with people like Sharat Saxena who plays some kind of underworld English speaking kingpin who wears dark shades, sits on a terrace with his half a dozen goons, is surrounded by those 80s style left over blue-n-white drums and announces - 'I am not interested in your love story; I want brave people'. Amarjeet's friend, who introduces him to the Don also warns him - 'He is a man of commitment, so be careful.'
It's just that the 'man of commitment' himself is nowhere to be seen in the entire second half of the film as his henchman pairs up with Amarjeet to do rest of the killing. Worse, one doesn't quite understand who is killing whom and what's the purpose behind that? So Amarjeet presses the trigger for the first time and just when he gets hold on a fake passport to fly back into India, courtesy Ms. Tulip Joshi, he decides to skip his flight and return to the mean streets.
Oh, and by the way, Tulip plays a girl in a dance bar who 'cannot be afforded', as stated by one of her junior colleagues. She sings 'bhojpuri' songs, speaks English, lives in Mauritius, fears a Pakistani don and falls in love with an Indian. A true ambassador of globalization!
Talking about Mauritius, one needs to give a rap on the knuckles of the person who created that fancy software that plays on Amarjeet's laptop. Mauritius is spelt as 'Muritus' along with at least a couple of more English errors that is embarrassingly displayed on the big screen. Moreover, the film's tagline 'Love Among Gun Shots' isn't syntactically correct either! But then who would have cared about such minor things when there are bigger and far more glaring loopholes in the films.
So what one gets to see is biggest contract killer in the entire globe, Lucky Ali, driving a bike on the streets of Mauritius and firing openly on poor Amarjeet. If that wasn't heroic enough, he also removes his helmet, proudly flaunts his revolver and keeps searching him on foot even as the entire marketplace makes way for him. He enters people's households and hotel rooms unannounced, kills them in quick successions, always leaves Tulip Joshi unscathed and misses his target whenever Amarjeet comes in sight. However, one chance and Amarjeet shoots him in a split second motion. Quite a feat, especially with a Mauritian super cop, who announces that 'he won't allow gang war to break in his city', is left hardly impresses that a 'common Indian' has managed to do what Interpol couldn't for all these years.
At the end, he turns out to be even more powerful as he knocks down Amarjeet with three (or were they four?) bullets. Well, not bad. Now if only he would have found him at the airport in the film's beginning itself and done the honours there and then. That would have been some relief for a poor viewer who all this while was thinking of 'running away' from this trash affair that is one of the worst of 2009.
PACKAGING
DVD of Runway comes in a rather glossy case and has a cover layout that goes with the action genre of the film
DURATION
The film's duration is 104 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES
None
TECHNICAL DETAILS
- 16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen Presentation
- Subtitles in English
- Dolby Digital 5.1 and Stereo
PRICE
Rs. 199/=
CONCLUSION
It's a known adage that when a film maker doesn't have any story to tell, he tries to perk up the narrative by using jump cuts, freeze frames and other technical wizardry. Now when all of this is controlled, it turns out to be a good experience. However, an excess of this means that there have been last minute attempts to pump in some life into the film at the editing table. Last year it was seen in Woodstock Villa, this year it's the turn of Runway.
The difference between Woodstock Villa and Runway is that the former still had something to say at least for those 90 minutes and moreover the frames were glossy. Sadly, in case of Runway there is none of the two; something that you realize 10 minutes into the film.
 
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