8x10 Tasveer Review

Cast :
Akshay Kumar, Ayesha Takia, Sharmila Tagore, Javed Jaffrey, Girish Karnad
Director :
Nagesh Kukunoor
Producer :
Nagesh Kukunoor
Genre :
Mystery
Release Date :
3-4-2009

Within the first 10 minutes of this Akshay Kumar pseudo-supernatural flick, our daredevil hero attempts a jaw-dropping stunt that will be another proud addition to his super impressive action resume. Merely to get some incriminating evidence against a forest poacher, our hero Akshay (Jai Puri) speeds through dense Canadian foliage, the camera following him with equal frenzy and swishing past difficult terrain, till he finally reaches the edge of 100 feet high cliff.
Without batting an eyelid, Jai jumps off the cliff in to the river below, with the adept camera capturing his descent in numerous angles in slow motion. In his brilliant free-fall, he sways, his arms wildly as if holding on to thin air. When he nears the end, his stance changes into that of the perfect dive -- arms by his side, his body ramrod straight, as he crashes into the water. After four minutes, he emerges, like a sea-warrior, with the evidence -- a bear trap which the poacher had injudiciously chucked, victorious that he has done well to bring those pesky poachers to justice.

That pretty much sums up the most thrilling moment you might hope to catch in this thriller in its entire two-plus hours span (hence the elaborate description). For director Nagesh Kukunoor’s first attempt at big budget extravaganza has neither the speed or tautness of a good thriller nor does it involve the audience in any interesting character play with the ones on screen. What is dished out is a laborious wannabe-whodunit with an impossibly naïve resolution.
8 x 10 Tasveer has Akshay playing a forest ranger in Canada living in with his fiancée Sheila (Ayesha Takia Azmi). When he is not attempting daredevil stunts for the sake of duty, Jai helps fellow civilians trace their missing sons and husbands with his special power: he can travel back into anybody’s past. All he needs is a photograph taken of the subject and, voila, he can see all that happened to the person before the photograph was taken, played out in his head.

Like we have come to know with most superpowers, this, too, comes with a ‘Conditions Apply’ tag: More than one minute into this photographic time travel will cause a serious health hazard to our gifted hero. So when his millionaire father dies in a mysterious yacht accident surrounded by close family and business associates, Jai decides to travel back in time through a photograph taken moments before the accident, to figure out who really is responsible for his daddy’s death. This is easier said than done, given the fact that there are multiple suspects, all with possible motives, which means multiple time travels, upping the health risk quotient.

To be fair, the film does have an interesting premise to start off on. But Kukunoor’s way of unravelling the suspense is ridden by inconsistencies and a laborious pace. For the first couple of times when Jai travels back through the photograph, seeing the events play out from different perspectives, you are mildly interested. But when this little time-trip is played out one after the other, it lapses into repetitiveness.

The director has no clever narrative format up his sleeve which would make this re-telling through multiple perspectives interesting. Instead, he resorts to convenient creative licenses and illogical jumps. And we are saddled with a story that prods on and on. When the long drawn out climax is eventually played out, revealing the twist in the tale, Kukunoor falls backs to an old favourite trick of Hindi cinema. The back story revealed is so unconvincing and so stupid that you are tempted to roll your eyes and just burst out, “All this tamasha for this? No, Really?”

Among the cast, Akshay Kumar tries to give his character some solidity, but comes off as trying too hard. He goes through the motions in an almost methodical fashion and there is little he can work on, given that he has to do this time-travel once too many times for his comfort. Of the supporting actors, stalwarts such as Girish Karnad and Sharmila Tagore are wasted in nothing roles, while the chubby-cheeked Ayesha fails to leave much of an impression.

The fact that they are saddled with uninspiring and clunky dialogue doesn’t help matters either. Also propping up almost irritatingly in regular intervals is a bumbling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder-ridden detective Happi (Javed Jafferi), clearly inspired from television's much more nuanced Tony Shalhoub as Monk. He is neither genuinely funny nor is the character given any agency to be of any consequence in the flow of the narrative.

At the end, 8 x10 Tasveer comes off as a wasted opportunity, a film that could have been so much more, but ends up sadly as uninspiring and hardly thrilling. There is a point in the film where Akshay looks in the camera and says in utmost seriousness, “I have a secret” (much like that famous line from The Sixth Sense, “I see dead people”). Well, we wish we could have taken this film just as seriously!