Roy Review: Promising Premise Killed By Lack Of Pace

MUMBAI: A visual treat that fails to be anything more than superficial, debutant writer-director Vikramjit Singh’s romantic thriller Roy is a listless, sluggish film that can put an insomniac to sleep.

But mercifully, Roy is anything but a typical in-your-face Bollywood flick. The sound design is subtle, the background score unobtrusive, and the tenor of the onscreen performances refreshingly subdued. What Roy lacks is soul and substance.

A temperamental Mumbai director, played by the suave Arjun Rampal, travels to Malaysia to shoot a film. There, he meets a woman from London (Jacqueline Fernandez), who is also a filmmaker.

The Mumbai man changes girlfriends like jackets, but this time around he develops a serious crush on the pretty stranger. The lady becomes his Muse and his incomplete screenplay begins to take shape.

In the fiction that he conjures up, a wily young art thief (Ranbir Kapoor) lands in Malaysia to rob a wealthy girl (Jacqueline in a double role) who lives alone on a sprawling estate.

Roy hinges on two parallel strands that overlap repeatedly. Real life, in which the two filmmakers explore each other’s feelings, and the imagined scenario, in which the conman launches a charm offensive to force his quarry to let her guard down, crisscross in a manner that is devoid of clarity and precision.

The film moves at a snail’s pace and is therefore unable to retain its grip on the audience beyond the first couple of sequences.

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