Arjun & Alison (2014) User Reviews

Needed bigger budget and better script.

[clintoncombined · 6/10 · 10 June 2014]

Low budget, filmed in Birmingham. It was unintentionally very funny at end, When Arjun is running to council house ( which was supposed to be university ) and he ran up hill back down towards city centre, appeared at back of old library. If your gonna make film you have to use proper locations. The council house is a university? They have funerals in St Pauls square? I thought Alison was good actress. I thought the supposed murder of a girl in bar would be ridiculously hard to believe and made no sense, as he was apparently cosy with another girl in bar, and then objected to ex, getting number so shot her? I thought the actor in that role was good and has potential, I also thought Arjuns girlfriend at the end could have been in the movie more as both these people had looks to be movie stars perhaps. I liked the Marilyn Monroe angle, I thought the fact that the murder took place notorious for place where gay men goto couple up on canal was a weird choice of location. Also the joke he told about elephant going into a bar, he should have stuck with elephant version and not changed it to gorilla, Missed an opportunity to use the old library as location. Clearly given use of council buildings and filmed a lot there, was it library university or council building? Also the murder of guy at start, there was'nt any like evidence of who killed him, and they sort of pin it on leader of BNP, but unless he was able to beam himself into location, how could they make assumption? It was nice to see politician shot in council office however.

An interesting but patchy film

[loveyourlife · 6/10 · 30 April 2014]

Having premiered last year at the London Indian Film Festival, this film surprisingly got a full national release in multiplexes. I say surprising because a. it's low budget and b. the film doesn't seem to know what it is and its pre-release marketing to the media has been fairly confused. Billed as a 'British Asian' flick; apart from the fact that the director and one of the two principal leads are British Indian, there's nothing to suggest it belongs to that loose genre. I think herein lies part of the problem; Cineworld, where I saw this, had this tagged as a Bollywood release, possibly and probably confusing cinema goers-- which may explain the exceptionally poor first review here on IMDb. It would have been better to aim it at a wider general audience. The film itself is a thriller (of sorts) on a very topical subject with two main characters- Alison, overly-acted in my opinion, and the muddled Arjun, an Indian overseas student (strangely with a British accent) played fairly well by Shiv Jhala. Enter side characters in the form of racist English Society leader and a spurned Scots boyfriend and you have the film's four living characters; the fifth having been stabbed in the first 10 minutes or so. Haphazardly building up to its climax, the ending was still predictable; nevertheless, production values aside, it's a decent early career effort from director Sidharth Sharma and shows possible promise of things to come.

Okay

[Retoucherryan · 5/10 · 19 March 2021]

Needs a much bigger budget. Still succeeds as an all-out assault on good taste.

British Indian film

[to_scarlet · 4/10 · 1 May 2014]

I watched this film this evening with a friend of mine, being a non Asian. I always go to watch all Indian films and having seen this labeled as a Bollywood film, I went to see it for that reason only, as I have been watching adverts on facebook and Indian TV channels as well. Well it was an alright film and quite predictable, acting was awful by some of the cast and low budget showed, though its trailer was super exciting compared to slow pace of the film. I am a student and I related to the film. Overall as an indie not a bad attempt though I expected better. Maybe cast more attractive people next time and better storyline and directon