Movie Review 3G : Good idea,lousy execution

Cell phones make the world go around. To be able to stay connected while you are on the move has its ups and downs,though,especially when your handset becomes the source of nightmares.

What if the press of a button whistles up not the person you want,but someone who sends you spiralling into hell? What if it is not a phone but an instrument of death and disaster?

3G gives us carefree couple Sam (Neil Nitin Mukesh) and Sheena (sonal Chauhan) whooping it up in sunny Fiji,surrounded by palm fronds and sparkling ocean fronts.

Their idyll is interrupted by a cell phone that comes to play an increasingly menacing part in their lives: they wake up to its loud ringtone,its phantom images causing nightmares.

Good idea,lousy execution. This is a mess of a movie,which ticks off its horror film checklist,one after the other: a church with a steeple,shadowy priests,spirits who wear splashy red gowns and kiss with a forked tongue,mysterious escort girls,‘mental’ patients scribbling on walls,guilty killers who hang themselves and deadly islands.

Nothing we haven’t seen before,in various films that dabble in the weird-things-happen-to-nice-people territory.

3G cobbles them together and delivers them in a standard Hindi movie format. Which means you keep getting yanked out of a scene that’s meant to frighten you and plonked into a song-and-dance routine. Which means more bikinis,more beaches,and more surf.

Sonal Chauhan is much more believable when she invites us to admire her bikini-ready hot bod,not when she simulates fear.

Neil Nitin Mukesh does a little better when he switches from a terror-struck character to someone who spreads fear,but it is all so sloppily done that you don’t even realise when not just your scare meter but you got switched off.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com