Rajneeti- A book with spoiled binding

Just watched Prakash Jha's much expected movie Rajneeti. Did you ever read a huge book with lots of chapters and pages that has a torn binding? Watching this movie is just like that... Story is good, acting is excellent but lot of characters and happenings crammed into 2.45 hrs makes watching a bit dull....

Rajneeti is an extensive journey into the dirty world of Indian Politics and it is based on the biggest political block buster of all times, the Mahabharatha. Remember the Shyam Benegal movie Kalyug starring Shasi Kapoor, Rekha, Raj Babbar which also took the theme of contemoprary retelling of Mahabharatha with a story of clash between two business tycoons? Something like that...

Biggest positive side of the movie is actors, a wonderful line of performing and underperforming actors who are part of this movie... Devgn, Shah, Katrina Kaif, Bajpayee, Ranbir Kapoor, Nana, Rampal and few more whom I forgot... The movie is fast paced, every scene lot of things happens, most of the scenes are multi starred and confrontation sequences... lot of energy flowing... Dialogues are top notch... Another good quality that I see is that the background scoring is minimal and really helps in digesting the heavy accented dialogues. (Katrina's included)

Negative is what I told at the start... Plots, subplots, sub sub plots, reels and reels of incidences and very poor editing... Many of the scenes go above the head...And climax is very lame for such a realistic movie, in Indian Politics no leader will ever go trigger happy... Climax was very Bolywoody....

And I wont give away the story because if I intend also it will take a lot of time and I have a flight to catch....

Then remaining part of the post is on actors... Manoj Bajpayee does probably his career best role, (atleast the best after Biku Mahatre of Satya) the guy just blasts his way into senses, like he often does during the political meetings in the movie.. Nana Patekar also gets a meaty role as an ever present suthradhar.... Ajay Devgn does the part of Karna and what to tell... the guy acts with his eyes... a shot of his eyes gives you despair, anger, inferiority complex, desire for power and a whole bunch of complex emotions according to the situation... Arjun Rampal shows great restraint in scenes where he terrorises with a smile and a few words.. especially the scene were he beats up the police guy, his eyes really look psycho... Kathrina Kaif's role is tailor made for her, bad accented, spoilt girl, going totally confused at turns of the events ending up as a Psycho's wife. Naseerudhin Shah does not have much work, but entire title sequence is his. Ranbir was the weak link... His role is like Al Pacino's in Godfather or more like Abhishek's in Sarkar... But the guy just dream walks through the whole movie with his droopy eyes and bored expression. In one way it was fine, because by watching him I felt things are not real and I was watching a movie...