Vikalp

Cast: Kranti Jha, Akshay Singh, Nirmal Pandey, Pankaj Berry, Abhijit Leher, Jyoti Singh, Omkar Singh, Deepal Shaw, Abhay Joshi

Director: Sachin P. Karande

The importance of a good technical team, director and proper financial backing are best showcased when a project turns out to be bad for the lack of these. Vikalp is an example. This one is a technological thriller. But from the look of the film, at no moment does it seem like one. Vikalp has many problems and the terrible shabby look is one of them. The cinematographer seems to have forgotten what 'focus' meant and the director never bothered to check. Result - half of the film is out of focus! And that, believe me, is extremely irritating. Also the grainy look, if it was a planned move, does not fit the movie and only makes things worse. For the genre in reference it would have helped to have a cleaner and sleek look.

This apart there are far too many flaws in detailing, be it characters or scenes. Double it up with poor dialogues! And then you have the unwanted songs - these hurt more because of the uninspiring music! On the good side, the basic plot of Vikalp is rather interesting and holds immense scope. Cyber crime is a topic that Bollywood is yet to explore. And the superb twists in tale in the second half manages to create attention. The story is about a girl called Rishika Gandhi who has been brought up in an orphanage. Bred in Marathi medium government institutions, she is a self taught computer genius. Rishika lands with a good job in Bangkok only to realize there is something very fishy about the place the she works in. Performances wise Deepal Shaw puts up a decent effort although her forced Marathi accent gives away at times. For an actress to get one whole film to herself is not something that happens too often in Bollywood and Deepal seems to have just turned lucky. Only if she had a better director and co-stars around her! Among the rest, Chetan Pandit is good. The film also happens to star Nirmal Pandey whose demise in early 2010 left us stunned. Not the most worthy last film for a talent who could have been exploited far more by the industry. First things first, 'Vikalp' isn't meant for 'aam junta' by any means. Since the film talks heavily about risk, security, code, hacking devices etc., it would be mostly indecipherable by a large segment of audience. Nothing wrong with that. After all as long as the film has a set target audience for itself and made in a reasonably budget, it is fine to pitch it accordingly.

However in execution of these ideas, there are problems aplenty. First and foremost problem is the very title of the film. Director Sachin P. Karande's debut flick 'Payback' released just a few days back and went unnoticed due to the very same reason. Now 'Vikalp' is even dicier as it gives an impression of a serious film with philosophical tone to it instead of a thriller about the hacking world. 'Vikalp' is about a young girl (Deepal Shaw) who has learnt the art of hacking entirely on her own but uses it in an ethical manner to expose loopholes in a system rather than misusing it for her own personal use. After being ridiculed by her first organisation, she moves to Bangkok and starts life afresh in a new IT company. Her assignment involves developing a hacking code that could be further used to safeguard the world of banking. But was this her real assignment?

After a jittery initial portion of the film which moves at a snail's pace, there is some movement that takes place once she manages to retrieve her stolen files from the server. After she reaches Bangkok for her new assignment and begins to write hacking code, the film does pick up pace. While one can see the twist coming from a distance, the interval point is decent enough to make you look forward to the second half. However, after a few interesting moments in the first 20-25 minutes of the second half, the film goes downhill, and how. A couple of random songs come out of nowhere, love stories start building up, Deepal's ex-boy friend lands up in Bangkok, her new boy friend has his own back story as well and then the worst of all are the penultimate 20-25 minutes where everything starts falling in (or out) of place way too conveniently. The revelation of culprits is hardly a surprise while the gun fire that happens inside an IT organisation is, to put it mildly, rubbish.

Amongst actors, Deepal definitely looks committed in her central protagonist character that she plays. Amongst other actors, the ones who leave an impression are Chetan Pandit (her boss in Bangkok) and the man who plays her boyfriend in Bangkok. Music is barely passable while cinematography is plain average. Really, for a film that did show a glimmer of hope at number of places and promised that there would be a good story in the offing after all fails miserably as it reaches the culmination point. To think of it, a film which had followed a real route and narrated the story of an IT professional who was a top ethical hacker ends at a stage where there is gunfire and 'dhishoom dhishoom' all around. Now if this isn't taking cinematic liberty too far, what else is?

Vikalp movie is about a girl Rishika Gandhi who is a docile, middle class & Marathi girl from an orphanage in Kolhapur is a sort of prodigy in the field of computer education. She lands up in a job with a respectable IT company in Mumbai because of her exceptional talent. Some goof up happens during her tenure as the code developer in the company. Rishika through her sheer genius wins over that hurdle and proves her detractors wrong but is so heart broken after that insult that she resigns from her job. At the same time her personal life too gets a jolt from the blue when the very affluent family of her five year old boy friend, suddenly discovers about their love affairs & visits her at her hostel room and blames her for using their son for seeking financial security for her. Humiliated & heart broken, Rishika ultimately decides to leave India and takes up the offer from another Bangkok based software company. Rishika thought that Bangkok was a great refuge from all her troubles in India but she was wrong. Within a couple of months of working there she realizes that she is caught in a network of internet criminals' and she was being used as a hacker in the name of software developer. Her passport and other documents are with the company only, when she decides to escape that network. Very soon she realized that leaving Bangkok against the wishes of those powerful criminals was not that easy. She is given a false identity of a criminal and she had nothing & no one on her side to prove that she is Rishika Gandhi. The technology through which she wanted to make an identity of her own ultimately has taken away her identity itself. It seems like an impossible to win battle for this timid, shy & low on self esteem girl. How Rishika wins her internal & external weakness to face the greatest challenge of her life using her education and will power makes up the highly moving and inspiring climax of the story