Ek Chalis Ki Last Local

Director : Music : Lyrics : Starring :

Sanjay Khandoori Sandesh Shandilya, Amar Mohile, Dj Aqeel, Sanjeev Mehboob, Ankur Tewari Abhay Deol, Neha Dhupia, Snehal Dhabi, Deepak Shirke, Ashok Samarth, Vinay Apte

Suddenly, everyone wants to do a Shantaram . Everyone wants to transform the Mumbai, Maximum City backdrop into a million dollar story. Alas, not everyone is a Gregory David Roberts nor a Suketu Mehta who can take Mumbai's underbelly and churn it into pages of heady exotica.

The problem with this treatise on Mumbai's nightlife lies in the sheer banality of the script which abounds with every stereotype that you have hitherto associated the bustling metropolis with.

And ironically, it leaves them as stereotypes. So that, you have the big and small gangsters locked in internecine wars. You have the crooked cops who can do anything for a khokha and a peti .

You have the pimps, whores, muggers and murderers who seem to take over the city once the last local leaves on its final journey. And then, you have the hero: a call centre coolie who dreams of the good life while slogging it out in the airless cube farms of the IT industry.

Trouble begins when the hero (Abhay Deol) misses the last local and befriends a lonely girl (Neha) who seems to have missed it too. The duo begin their nightly ramblings with a trip to the nearest bar and end up in a police jeep full of cops who are hell bent on bumping them off in the by now infamous encounters.

In between, they slip in and out of a gambling den full of goondas , get embroiled in a murder, look for succour in a slum bustee of scary eunuchs and end up with the realisation that Mumbai actually wakes up when everybody sleeps.

Sad! Because by then, you are almost asleep with this strange concoction of characters and sub-plots which reduce the colourful city to a plastic canvas, plastered with pulp.