RA-One

WARNING: Long post with spoilers.

Coming back after spending a week with my family, I was sitting alone at home on a lazy Sunday evening watching Ranveer Singh do something silly hosting GIMA on TV. (Yes, that was the level of boredom and loneliness.) At this point I receive a call from Sunny asking me if I would be interested in watching RA-One. Thinking what could be worse than what I was already doing and also believing in SRK fan following assuming we would not get the tickets and will end up having drinks and dinner, I agreed. Little did I know then, how wrong both these assumptions would prove to be. 

I reached R-City and was welcomed by a deserted box office, as I have seen never before. I started getting the feeling that probably I overestimated SRK's fan following. I reach the counter and ask the guy for two tickets of RA-.One for a show 15 minutes later (there were shows lined up at the gap of every 30 minutes). The person at the counter shows me the layout and to my surprise barely 15 seats were booked and I chose two seats in the last row. Now the guy at the counter did something for which I should have thanked him after the movie. He asked, if I would like to go for a popcorn+samosa+pepsi combo offer. Normally I would refuse such an offer, but probably some good karma made me accept the offer this time. I accepted the offer remarking that this might prove to be the best investment of the night. (Yes, that low was my expectation from the movie I was about to watch).

The movie that was promoted in a way that you had to be deaf and blind and extremely lucky, all three at the same time to ignore it, begins with a very irritating video game sequence filled with stupid jokes, silly bollywood references and worst ever cameos by Priyanka Chopra and Sanjay Dutt. The sequence was so irritating that I wished now we will be asked to choose between Ajooba, Toofan, Shiva ka Insaaf and RA-One for next part of the ticket price. I would have happily chosen any of the three anytime over RA-One, that's how irritating the sequence was. I at this point was desperately waiting for my popcorn+samosa+pepsi. The sequence ends with an irritating long haired kid being woken up by his teacher. I felt like slapping the teacher for letting kids with such imagination sleep in her class. It could have saved us some pain. Nevermind. I paid, so I continued to watch hoping at some point I might get the worth of my money. There comes the happiest moment in next 3 hours. My popcorn+samosa+pepsi arrived. Pepsi tasted like nectar at this point.

We are now introduced with the irritating father of the irritating kid, a tamilian struggling with his accent so badly that he changes it in every third sentence he speaks, Shekhar Subramanian. The kid does not like his father and considers him a looser. (then why the hell in his imagination he was playing his father's look alike). You cannot blame the kid though because that's what everyone else around him feels about him. Oh wait, I forgot to mention a very irrelevant sequence where some kind of conference if being held where people are discussing how data is transferred over the air and how monograms work and we are expected to believe that they were talking something clever. Coming back to Shekhar, who is a video game designer or programmer or whatever. He is considered such a looser that his boss threatens him to be given a cook's job he doesn't come up with a decent gaming idea this time. By the way the boss is played by a very irritating looking Dileep Tahil. In this scene we are also introduced with a Chinese guy who doesn't like to be called Jackie Chan and he seems to be there because of his marshal art skills. 

We are now introduced to the mother of the irritating kid and wife of the irritating Shekhar played by Kareena Kapoor making you wander how a looser like Shekhar got a wife like her. Then she opens her mouth and you get your answer. She is for reasons unknown to anyone doing a ground breaking thesis on Indian abuses (they are living in London) and starts irritating you with her versions of those abuses. At this point I realised I had eaten my samosa and I started worrying how I will survive the rest of the movie. The popcorn was still there as my saviour superhero. Oops. I digress. We are told that the kid is a video game lover and he likes villains more than heroes and plays using nickname Lucifer. His parents don't find it disturbing at all and the loving father decides to create the most awesome villain ever to mend his relationship with his son.

Thus starts the process of designing the most kick-ass video game ever with the most awesome villain. The villain is called Random Access Version One, so that by some clever thinking he can be named as RA.1 and pronounced as Ravan. I like subtlety. With not so clever thinking the hero is named Good.One popularly known as G.1 and pronounced as Jeevan. So little attention was paid while designing the hero that they even decided to give him looser Shekhar's face. (Such a looser he is that he believes going to work dressed as Michael Jackson will make his son like him. Also nobody told him that making a strong villain and making a weak hero are not the same things). In order to make RA-One the deadliest villain ever Shekhar literally feeds seven deadly sins inside RA-One's program and Jackie Chan literally teaches him how to fight. But with the limited intelligence Shekhar has got, he can only come up with a single player first person fight game with only one hero and one villain, which has only three levels of two minutes each and somehow everyone believes that it is an awesome idea and starts partying. Our Shekhar, who eats noodles with curd, drinks and dances in the party while leaving his son to play the game which has yet not been tested properly and is full of bugs. One big glitch being that you cannot quit the game. When his son playing with the nickname Lucifer pauses the game in between RA-One does not like it and threatens to end the game in real world. He was one impatient villain and couldn't wait for Lucifer to play that game again. So he comes out of the game and kills Jackie Chan, takes his form and kills Shekhar as well. 

South Indian Shekhar  receives christian burial somehow leaving ashes and bones to his wife so that they can be thrown in the river. The clever kid realises that his father was killed by RA-One, just like that and decides to enquire on that. All this while nobody bothered to visit the gaming lab at Shekhar's office where a dead Jackie Chan was hanging just outside server room through wires. The kid with the help from another technician played by Shahana Goswami brings G-One to the real world by simply copying RA-One's activities from the logs. At this point I had finished my popcorn and Pepsi and was getting restless to get something more to eat to survive through the rest of the movie. All this while RA-One morphed as Jackie Chan was looking for Lucifer in the streets of London. He even searches through logs of an ATM, which somehow stored customer's demographics. Anyway. By this point RA-One gets to know that the kid is Lucifer and decides to finish the game by killing him. He chases the mother and the kid on the streets of London and at last moment is stopped by G-One. Oops, I forgot to tell you about HART, which is similar to the reactor that powers IronMan's suit but don't think SRK has copied it from there because this HART is also the key to killing RA-One and G-One. They can only be killed when they are wearing their respective HARTs (which for no reason G-One wears on right side and RA-One wears at center of their chests) by the gun which mysteriously appears in level 3 of the game.

This is where comes the second happiest moment of the movie. Intermission, and I rush outside to get something more to eat to survive the post interval part.

This part of the movie is dedicated to Rijvaan Khan of My Name is Khan frame. G-One who just saved Kareena and the Kid from RA-One by engaging in a fierce battle with him without any assistance suddenly cannot even move out of a car without the Kid asking him to do so. What follows is another offensive scene where G-One has to wear a lot of body piercings to pass the metal detector to hide his metal frame, while in the same scene we see that he somehow has acquired human skin. G-One now comes to Mumbai with mother and kid and bump into Chitti in a useless cameo, where Rajnikanth looks like his own duplicate. (I still am not able to figure out how UK authorities issued air ticket on a dead man's passport, since G-One was travelling as Shekhar.)

What follows is a series of events any normal human brain cannot fathom, like G-One eating circuit board, releasing some wire like substance off his nose (is G-One a robot with complicated circuit or a character out of a video game?), sitting on top of a builiding with RA-One's HART in one hand for no reason, celebrating Dussehra after Karva Chauth. On this occasion of Dussehra RA-One reaches Mumbai in search of his HART and Lucifer as a bald Arjun Rampal. 

RA-One now kidnaps the kid and blackmails G-One into returning his HART but before that he has to save Kareena from a speeding local train entering inside CST station. Our superhero with limited super powers takes so long to stop the train that it results into the destruction of iconic CST station, but giving him a chance to pose for the poster with Kareena in his arms. Then he charges himself with electricity ala Crank and gets ready for a climax fight with mighty RA-One.

In the fight to death climax somehow G-One manages to reach level three and both get the anti-HART gun. RA-One shoots G-One with that gun and G-One in a ullu banaya charkha chalaya like moment shows him how he was not wearing his HART and could not die. Now it is G-One's turn to fire. Smart RA-One splits into ten and challenges G-One to shoot the real one. While everyone could clearly identify the real RA-One, it took Shekhar's poem for G-One and the kid to find out the real one. RA-One who could not learn how to beat the gun from G-One few seconds before, dies and for no reason G-One must sacrifice himself. In order to create the possibility of a sequel in the end somehow G-One comes back out of thin air.

I am too tired now to write any further and am sure by now you all would also be tired off reading this long post so I better stop here. Overall it was a tiring experience watching this movie.