<p>Director: Vikramjit Singh<br /><br />Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Jacqueline Fernandez<br /><br />A visual treat that fails to be anything more than superficial, debutant writer-director Vikramjit Singh's romantic thriller Roy is a listless, sluggish film that can put an insomniac to sleep.<br /><br /></p>.<p>But mercifully, Roy is anything but a typical in-your-face Bollywood flick. The sound design is subtle, the background score unobtrusive, and the tenor of the onscreen performances refreshingly subdued. What Roy lacks is soul and substance.<br /><br />A temperamental Mumbai director, played by the suave Arjun Rampal, travels to Malaysia to shoot a film. There, he meets a woman from London (Jacqueline Fernandez), who is also a filmmaker.<br /><br />The Mumbai man changes girlfriends like jackets, but this time around he develops a serious crush on the pretty stranger. The lady becomes his Muse and his incomplete screenplay begins to take shape.<br /><br />In the fiction that he conjures up, a wily young art thief (Ranbir Kapoor) lands in Malaysia to rob a wealthy girl (Jacqueline in a double role) who lives alone on a sprawling estate.<br /><br />Roy hinges on two parallel strands that overlap repeatedly. Real life, in which the two filmmakers explore each other's feelings, and the imagined scenario, in which the conman launches a charm offensive to force his quarry to let her guard down, crisscross in a manner that is devoid of clarity and precision.<br /><br />The film moves at a snail's pace and is therefore unable to retain its grip on the audience beyond the first couple of sequences.<br /><br />The psychological underpinning of the narrative is barely intelligible until a few minutes before the halfway mark, the point at which it emerges that the art heist is a figment of the fictional filmmaker's imagination.<br /><br />Roy fritters away the makings of an interesting plot premise. Had a little more thought gone into the film, it might have been a different story.<br /><br />The songs are hummable, the storytelling style is refreshingly free from Bollywood-style high drama, and the director allows the actors to underplay their characters. Rampal, as the writer-filmmaker running short of inspiration, is earnest in his effort to live the part.<br /><br />Jacqueline Fernandez, who gets a great deal of footage, is unable to break free from the inchoate nature of the two roles that she plays.<br /><br />As for Ranbir, it is palpable that he is searching for more meat in the characterisation. Sadly, there just isn't enough in the role for him to dig his teeth into.<br /><br />Roy, despite some impressive stylistic elements, is undone by its lack of momentum and energy. Be that as it may, Vikramjit Singh seems to be a director definitely worth keeping an eye on.</p>
<p>Director: Vikramjit Singh<br /><br />Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Jacqueline Fernandez<br /><br />A visual treat that fails to be anything more than superficial, debutant writer-director Vikramjit Singh's romantic thriller Roy is a listless, sluggish film that can put an insomniac to sleep.<br /><br /></p>.<p>But mercifully, Roy is anything but a typical in-your-face Bollywood flick. The sound design is subtle, the background score unobtrusive, and the tenor of the onscreen performances refreshingly subdued. What Roy lacks is soul and substance.<br /><br />A temperamental Mumbai director, played by the suave Arjun Rampal, travels to Malaysia to shoot a film. There, he meets a woman from London (Jacqueline Fernandez), who is also a filmmaker.<br /><br />The Mumbai man changes girlfriends like jackets, but this time around he develops a serious crush on the pretty stranger. The lady becomes his Muse and his incomplete screenplay begins to take shape.<br /><br />In the fiction that he conjures up, a wily young art thief (Ranbir Kapoor) lands in Malaysia to rob a wealthy girl (Jacqueline in a double role) who lives alone on a sprawling estate.<br /><br />Roy hinges on two parallel strands that overlap repeatedly. Real life, in which the two filmmakers explore each other's feelings, and the imagined scenario, in which the conman launches a charm offensive to force his quarry to let her guard down, crisscross in a manner that is devoid of clarity and precision.<br /><br />The film moves at a snail's pace and is therefore unable to retain its grip on the audience beyond the first couple of sequences.<br /><br />The psychological underpinning of the narrative is barely intelligible until a few minutes before the halfway mark, the point at which it emerges that the art heist is a figment of the fictional filmmaker's imagination.<br /><br />Roy fritters away the makings of an interesting plot premise. Had a little more thought gone into the film, it might have been a different story.<br /><br />The songs are hummable, the storytelling style is refreshingly free from Bollywood-style high drama, and the director allows the actors to underplay their characters. Rampal, as the writer-filmmaker running short of inspiration, is earnest in his effort to live the part.<br /><br />Jacqueline Fernandez, who gets a great deal of footage, is unable to break free from the inchoate nature of the two roles that she plays.<br /><br />As for Ranbir, it is palpable that he is searching for more meat in the characterisation. Sadly, there just isn't enough in the role for him to dig his teeth into.<br /><br />Roy, despite some impressive stylistic elements, is undone by its lack of momentum and energy. Be that as it may, Vikramjit Singh seems to be a director definitely worth keeping an eye on.</p>