Fugly review: Bad acting doesn't help the already atrocious film

Somewhere towards the final act of Fugly, which already seemed like it was too long, a corrupt policeman called ‘Imple’, breaks out of a locked room in a decrepit old Delhi building. His phone has been thrown away, as have his clothes. He gets out in his underwear, looking hassled, and searches frantically for something to wear. A curious toddler appears and stares with him with a mixture of bafflement and delight. The policeman, having found a woman’s top to wear for the time being, barks angrily at the kid and runs off. The camera lingers on the child’s expression before cutting away to the next scene.

This is pretty much the only genuine, true-to-intention moment in Kabir Sadanand’s atrocious Fugly. Starring Jimmy Sheirgill as a wisecracking Jat thulla, Fugly combines the plots of two well-worn films – Rang De Basanti (2006) and Shaitan (2011) – to come up with a higgledy-piggledy mess of a movie.

It doesn’t entertain you, it doesn’t move you, it doesn’t affect you – you just thrash about in the dark and beg for it to end, like bad sex. It boasts of four youngsters making their debut, one of them Olympic boxing medalist Vijender Singh. We don’t know if any of them can act because it doesn’t seem like they really tried to do so here.

Who is Kabir Sadanand, you ask, and what should we know about him? Well, for starters, this is his third directorial venture. He made his debut in 2004 with the imaginatively titled Popcorn Khao! Mast Ho Jao (you probably remember this song), which sank without a trace. His second film was Tum Milo Toh Sahi (2010), also a massive critical and commercial turkey. Aside from that, according to his IMDB profile, he has also done several bit roles in films such as Chameli (2003).

(Did I just waste a paragraph talking about Sadanand just so I could pad up the word count on this review, due to lack of having anything else to say? Absolutely.)

To be fair, it’s not like the premise lacked potential. Four close friends – Dev (Mohit Marwah), Devi (Kiara Advani), Gaurav (Vijender Singh), and Aditya (Arfi Lamba) – have a run-in with the extremely corrupt and reprehensible Inspector Chautala, who decides to blackmail them for large amounts of money in return for keeping them out of jail. Aside from the main story, every now and then there is the odd moment or character quirk that seems full of promise, like a lost thought from the mind of a Coen brother.

However, Fugly proceeds to treat each of its ideas with utter disdain, ruining scene after scene with bad acting, stilted dialogue delivery, and terrible background music. Consider one supposedly emotionally-charged scene in which the four friends are on the verge of carrying out a drastic plan. Aside from being completely unconvincing about how they’re feeling (anyone can pretend to convey a certain emotion – a professional actor should be able to convey why they’re feeling something without resorting to dialogue), the four of them (plus another sniveling side-character who is equally bad) stand around awkwardly with their fronts to the camera as though in a school play. Add to that cringe-worthy dialogue, baffling use of skip-frames and slow-motion, and one is left wondering: did the director intend the entire film to be ironic?

I mean, how else do you explain one of the more WTF segments in the film, one that involves a song – all of which are awful, by the way – called ‘ Good In Bed ’? In this, just after we have learned that the four friends are being forced to organize sleazy parties in Delhi farmhouses and are unhappy about it, they break into song and start gyrating with random Caucasian women. Oh, speaking of which, Fugly is expectedly full of broad stereotyping. They’re all there, from the whiny girlfriend to the gay man who is so horny that he will make an overt move on a straight man even though he is at a police station and being escorted out by a cop. Bleargh.

Shergill isn’t a bad actor and, to be fair, he makes a valiant effort here to seem menacing. However, it does seem to be a case of unsatisfactory casting for a role that Yashpal Sharma, Vijay Raaz, Manu Rishi, or about half a dozen other character actors in Hindi cinema could’ve played with ease. Meanwhile, the four main characters stick to playing versions of themselves and, really, that cannot qualify as acting. Especially bad are Marwah and Advani, who are still very self-conscious in front of the camera.

We are only a week away from Humshakals and one may therefore ask: is Fugly really all that bad compared to the other tripe we’re forced to watch? Yes it is. A terrible story is a terrible story, but a terrible story being told by someone with an overconfident smirk on their face is the worst thing ever.