Average fare

Abir (Dev) a cool dude from the Westernised,snobbish south is forced to shift to Dorji Para with his parents. With time,Abir becomes the lone crusader willing to bash up goons and chase them out of the para when their politician leader sends them to scare the residents off. He becomes friends with Eleven Bullets and his landlords confused family,falls in love with Rani (Payel Sarkar),his landlords niece and trains the group in cricket.

The local politician is hell-bent on acquiring the spacious,dilapidated mansion of the Choudhuris. When efforts to dissuade him fail,Abir throws the gauntlet a la Lagaan. They will play a match against any team the politician chooses. If Eleven Bullets wins,the politician will leave the para forever with his gun-toting ruffians. If they dont,the neighbourhood will clear itself and make way for the shopping mall the politician wants to build. Eleven Bullets wins and the para is saved from the clutches of the politician. At least one politician,never mind the celluloid identity,sticks to the bet.

The south is represented by Abir,a Superman who can do everything single-handedly while the cricketers do not lift a finger to back him but watch mesmerised as he takes on the goons single-handed,and challenges any politician who approaches to create problems or threaten the locals. The real residents of the north will be very unhappy about this one-sided and biased approach towards their part of the city. By the time the match is won,Abir is so firmly entrenched in Dorji Para that the schism the film began with makes no sense anymore.

The pre-credit frames are promising with every glass smashed by the cricket ball,the sound of crashing windows punctuating the soundtrack. But the rest of the film does not live up to the promise. Padmanava Dasguptas story and script is grossly unfair to the characters that form the cricket team. They are just there,like the chorus in a Greek play,necessary but only in the background. Indradeep Dasguptas music is mind-blowing but the choreography is terrible. The Sufi song positioned like a dream is particularly haunting but has no place in the story except playing up to the minority gallery. Why? The songs in the Sri Lanka scenes are melodious and romantic. Once again,they do not belong.

Dev is good but Payal is better. She should have cut down on her loudness in the first half. Debjani Chatterjee as the sex-hungry older sister of Rani gives an electric performance. Somak Mukherjees camera does justice to the multiple perspectives of the neighbourhood – the bylanes and the gullies and the high-rises somewhere close by and the mind-blowing chase sequence. But it is Rabi Ranjan Maitras clever editing that hides the amateurish,probably unrehearsed shots of the final cricket match. Instead of cricket,if it had been football,the Lagaan link would not have come into play and ruined the film!
Rating
One star is for the music and one is for the acting cast.