Yet another film that features a protagonist who can peep into the future, Kal Kissne Dekha stars newcomer Jackky Bhagnani as small-town bumpkin Nihaal Singh who arrives all wide-eyed in Mumbai to pursue his college education. Evidently the makers of this film haven't set foot on a Mumbai campus or they'd have known such sprawling universities have no address in Maximum City, sadly they only seem to exist in Karan Johar films – and even those are shot in London or Scotland. Anyway, Nihaal soon falls for spoilt little rich girl Misha (played by first-timer Vyshalee Desai) after he saves her from a bomb that would have blown her into bits if he hadn't 'seen' it with his special powers just minutes before. Next thing he knows, everyone from his buddies to the college principal is hounding him with questions about their future. A physics professor (played by Rishi Kapoor in a ridiculous grey wig) assigns Nihaal to a personal project he's been working on, and unwittingly gets the kid to help him create a device that could jam the city's communications network. What Nihaal doesn't know is that the Prof intends to use this jammer to allow his terrorist buddy to sneak in and plant bombs across the length and breadth of Mumbai. You don't need to be a genius to guess that in the end, Nihaal must use his special powers to locate each bomb before it goes off, and to rescue his sweetheart from the clutches of the bad guys. Directed by Vivek Sharma (of Bhootnath shame), Kal Kissne Dekha is your outdated B-grade potboiler whose sole ambition is to herald the arrival of a second-generation film kid – in this case Jackky, son of the film's producer, veteran Vashu Bhagnani. As an advert for the debutant, I suppose the film just about serves its purpose -- Jackky can dance, Jackky can fight. But can Jackky act? From this film you cannot tell. Convenient and incohesive, the script of Kal Kissne Dekha is filled with lazy lapses and holes so big you could drive a ship through them. You could forgive the absence of logic in this film and even the dozen-odd creative liberties that the script takes, if there was confidence in Sharma's direction. Problem is, Kal Kissne Dekha is anything but an assured effort. Supporting actors like Satish Shah, Farida Jalal and Archana Puran Singh ham through their scenes, and only Rishi Kapoor himself can enlighten us on why an actor of Rishi Kapoor's calibre would accept a thankless role like this. Your heart goes out to poor Ritesh Deshmukh who provides the film its gratuitous comic track, appearing as a guise-swapping don. If you look closely, you'll notice an overweight Sanjay Dutt show up like a junior artiste in precisely three shots in a song sequence, and even the charming Juhi Chawla makes an embarrassing one-scene cameo. None of this helps. Because Kal Kissne Dekha is made from the pocket and not the heart. The eye-watering foreign locations, the slick production values – they don't distract your attention from the painfully predictable script and the amateurish execution. Newbie Vyshalee Desai is too raw and fails to make any impression, and Jackie Bhagnani – for whom this film exists – has only his confidence going for him. Kal Kissne Dekha is much like those bad '90s potboilers that we'd be happy never to revisit again.Send your enemies to watch this one!
Review of Kal Kissne Dekha
