Click to play videoCast: Sharman Joshi, Sohail Khan, Eesha Koppikar, Gul Panag, Amrita Arora and Sharat Saxena
Director: Atul Agnihotri
There's a scene in Hello in which the six protagonists of the film are trapped in a car that's dangling precariously off the edge of a construction site. Death is imminent.
Until they are saved by a phone-call from God.
This one time — just this one time — you wish God had been busy attending to something more important, so the characters in this film had indeed plummeted down to a gruesome end. For one, it would have made this film at least fifteen minutes shorter. And two, it would have been a very fitting revenge for the agony these characters put you through just watching them go about their scenes in this terrible film.
Adapted from Chetan Bhagat's bestselling novel One Night at the Call Centre, Hello is an embarrassingly amateurish movie. Remember the kind of class plays one put up in the school quadrangle when one was 12?
This film is only a marginally more professional effort than that. The screenplay, written by Bhagat himself and the film's director Atul Agnihotri, is slipshod and contrived, and in fact it's so silly you can't help laughing even when you're not meant to.
The plot's focused on a group of six call-centre employees in Mumbai who're grappling with serious personal issues, and the life-altering experience they go through on this particular night-shift.
Starring Sharman Joshi as a call-centre team-leader in the making, and Sohail Khan, Eesha Koppikar, Gul Panag, Amrita Arora and Sharat Saxena as the members of his team, Hello makes it abundantly clear that attention-to-detail isn't top on its list of priorities.
Call-centre employees everywhere will no doubt be horrified at the careless manner in which their jobs and they themselves have been represented in this film.
Starting with the call-centre in Hello, which looks more like the lobby of a three-star hotel, to its executives who always seem to be on a break or using official lines to make personal calls, the filmmakers seem unaware of and indifferent towards even basic details about the world they've set their story in.
The very backdrop of a call-centre could have made for an interesting film; if nothing else a slice-of-life drama about the youngsters who're employed at such places. But the makers of Hello never really dig deep. What you get are feeble attempts at comedy, a generous dose of America-bashing, and even a serving of some pop-patriotism.
The characters in this film are dull and uninspired, and the actors playing these characters are just as bored.
Sharman Joshi and Sohail Khan lend a few moments of silly humour, but the others appear to be sleepwalking through their scenes.
Some characters — like the call-centre head-honcho and the systems maintenance guy — are exaggerated to such a degree that they come off looking like idiots. Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif, who bookend the film with short appearances before and after the main drama, have evidently been roped in to lend some star support, but they can't do a thing to make Hello any less boring.
When you occasionally find yourself laughing in your seat, you realise you're laughing AT the film, not WITH it. In the end, Hello is not just a dull film, it's an extremely stupid one. It's one of those films that has virtually nothing good in it.
I'm going with one out of five and a thumbs-down for director Atul Agnihotri's Hello. Go for a long walk in the park instead of suffering through this awful film.
Rating: 1 / 5 (Poor)
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