Raid: The dockside

Raid: the Dockside

Vikram Bhatt demonstrates why it is a bad idea to watch "Cries and Whispers" and "Basic Instinct" just before brainstorming for a new method to take money off a credulous audience. While not completely an expedition of suitably clad cockroach-killer wielding amazons out to recapture Diego Garcia, Red does come close, in all critically acclaimable aspects of the matter.

I imagine the conversation must have gone something as follows:

Dyerector: "The last decent movie we made was way back in 2002! Let's do something new, it is a great opportunity moving forward to capitalize on our culturally challenged audience."

Yes-Man 1: "Aye Aye, Cap'n!"

D: "You know..."

Yes-Man 2: "Yes Sir!"

D: "...Actually, you don't. I watched two whole movies yesterday!"

YM1: "I believe Congratulations are in order, sir. How were they?"

D: "Red! Red! I have a new idea for a movie, now."

YM's: "Congratulations, sir!"

D: "This will be a movie about murder. There will be a lot of redness around. In fact, we'll fade from and to red between scenes!"

YM1: "Wonderful Sir!"

And thus, was born Red. The movie starts off with Affitabh pawning his dog at the local, and promptly suffering from the debilitating effects of a hole in the heart (Note that this is not necessarily the same as the aftereffects of having an arrow through a cardioid shape that happens near the ides of February, but for the sake of argument is assumed to be so.) After a long and involved trip through hospital rooms and general cinematography reminiscent of this, we see Affy get a new heart, a bottle of "immunosuppressant" drugs, and promptly celebrate by getting drunk and trying to find out who was the previous possessor of his heart. Affy, by the way, owns a computer corporation called CompTran, when he's not pawning dogs or otherwise falling around in fits (and various other things).

The "immunosuppressant" touch is very nice, by the way. According to the movie, he has to take them for the rest of his life, to prevent the new fluid pump from being rejected by his body (true). His doctor also claims that these drugs reduce infection rate (true, for a certain restricted meaning of infection), and have other most
interesting effects (truth unknown) that form a key step of the plot. If nothing else, it makes one wonder: what poison takes about an hour to act, but once it starts, affects the "immune system" rapidly, but still leaves the victim capable of a spirited rendition of Hamlet's soliloquy?

Speaking of Ham: guess who was responsible for the music for this movie? We need say no more, save the fact that it is an appropriate backdrop to the red-(un)clad heroines that infest this movie. Horrifying visuals apart, the two heroines don't do much more than remind us that we could have been wasting time in more pleasant ways.

To get back to the (excuse for a) storyline, the hero finds out who he stole his pump from. After a certain amount of stalking this person's wife, wherein our hero nearly undergoes a frontal lobotomy by metal rod (which would have improved the movie no end), meets up with the love of his life, and generally scatters a few woses awound. Much unpleasantness later, the movie grinds towards its conclusion, leaving the audience free to meditate on the transience of material (the hero's Breitling watch) and non-material (our temper) goods.

As an interesting aside, we note that the so called tabloid newspaper featured as the hero stalks makes the grave mistake of referring to the "greiving[sic] widow". Maybe she was a graven window, an example of "Arbeit macht grei", but it grieves us to see such examples of shoddy copyediting lifted into prominence by a movie that otherwise maintains uniformly standards otherwise: low necklines, low comedy, low lows, and we low not what else.

To paraphrase the last (or thereabouts) line of the movie: we'd die to have not watched this movie, we may want to kill the idiot who dragged us to this movie, but we're damned fools to have watched it in the first place.