Behind bars

Johnson Thomas

Yashraj’s ‘Qaidi Band’ barely had a run in the theatres a couple of weeks ago, before another similar movie, ‘Lucknow Central’, hit the screen. While the former was about a bunch of young under-trails languishing in prison, coming together to form a prison band and then trying to find an escape route, this one has a barely discernible difference in that it is led by a potential death row convict Kishen Mohan Girhotra (Farhan Akhtar). He puts together a plan of escape by forming a Qaidi Band, meant to participate in the annual battle of prison inmates-led bands from all across the state. 

Farhan’s casting appears to be a choice entirely based on his ‘Rock On’ outing, but here he seems a little off colour and unable to make it look even believable. Jail Superintendent (Ronit Roy) though is not amused. He doesn’t think any of the guys could make it to a band, leave alone play a tune. But The IG who has been conveniently threatened by the CM (Ravi Kishen) takes on the challenge, as a do-or-get-relegated-to-traffic responsibility.

This jail-break drama has the obvious inmate bullying, cop threats, in-house gang wars in addition to the songs and dance numbers. However, it’s all put together quite illogically and haphazardly. The members of the band (other than Kishen) are shown as particularly inept at music to begin with and then suddenly they come up with a beat-boxing number that gets them viral on the YouTube.  

While the contest is on, the new band wastes a lot of time in a pit after escaping from the hawk-eyes of the guards on duty in the high security prison, trying to come to terms with whether Kishen should escape or not. Everything appears so easy and do-able that one would think prisons in India are totally breakable. While the noble zeal to point out the flaws in the justice system is appreciable, it’s not okay to make the exercise look like a bad copy of ‘Escape to Victory.’