Mission Turkey!

Please put your hands together to felicitate the one and only Apoorva Lakhia for making the worst film of the year so far – Mission Istanbul. This one's a Turkey if there ever was one, and to relish it, you've got to be in the mood for Christmas!

To put it mildly, ‘Mission Istanbul’ is ‘Murder of Cinema’ and I am sure the future generations of film students could write several theses on this murder. It has such a cruelly contrived story that you wonder if the writers of the script are truly in touch with the real world. Guess what! Al Qaeda roams free in Kabul post the American invasion of Afghanistan and the public killings still take place in football stadiums under the rule of the new Afghan government. Not just this, Northern Alliance is still fighting its battle with Al Qaeda. I truly feared that the Director would next show Ahmed Shah Masood alive and kicking the sh*t out of Al Qaeda. Thankfully, that didn’t happen!

The film could have made interesting points about the economics of terror, the commoditization of news and its sensationalized packaging as entertainment. It also alludes to various vested Western interests in keeping the region in conflict but takes that thread nowhere. Sequences, set pieces and plot devices are liberally sourced from Hollywood fare such as Enemy of the State, The Siege, The Matrix, Swordfish and the Hong Kong actioner Infernal Affairs. The rest apparently came from the fertile imaginations of the director and writer. One of which would be the blatant product and tagline placement for a fizzy drink (Mountain Dew) done so horribly badly that I, for one, am never going to be able to pick up a can of that stuff again!

Vivek Oberoi opts for a knowing smirk while Zayed Khan looks like he's barely able to control his steroid rage. No opportunity to overact is missed by either of them. Shabbir Ahluwalia and Nikitin Dheer are no better. Shriya Saran constantly looks like she's straining to remember her lines (or she's smelt something unpleasant) while Shweta Bhardwaj's simpering appears better suited for ads in the back pages of certain guy magazines.

Apoorva Lakhia’s (one of the most overrated Directors in Bollywood) style of filmmaking is to take stylish shots and put them in quick succession to each other and add the remaining impact by loud background music. He really needs to work as an assistant under some truly qualified director to get the basics right. This is the same movie that was offered to Apoorva Lakhia, with the accompanying fat pay cheque, it was not money well spent for the producers Suniel Shetty & Ekta Kapoor.

There are so many flaws in the film that one can keep on writing….. The true heros of the film are the audience who brave sitting through this ‘Mission Turkey’. And before this piece becomes even more incoherent than it already is, I must sign off and attempt to undo the brain damage. Let's just hope Apoorva Lakhia doesn't decide to make a sequel and call it MI:2 as he has already compared this ‘Mission Turkey’ to ‘Mission Impossible’ in one of his interviews!