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Friday, September 23, 2011

Speedy Singhs Movie Review - Komal Nahta


Vinay Virmani, living in Toronto with his family, wants to play professional hockey while his father wants him to look after the family business. Defying his father, he puts together an all-Indian hockey team and gets a foreign coach to train it. Does the team take on the other teams? Read the review of Speedy Singhs for more.

Business Rating: 0.5/5 star

Star cast: Vinay Virmani, Camilla Belle, Rob Lowe, Anupam Kher, Gurpreet Guggi, Russell Peters.

What’s Good: Nothing really!

What’s Bad: The story which is devoid of novelty; the poor screenplay; the generally weak performances of the artistes; absence of excitement of the game of hockey.

Verdict: Speedy Singhs is a poor show all the way and will be left behind in the box-office race. Its dubbed Hindi version will meet with the same fate.

Loo break: Any time, any number of times.

Watch or Not?: Watch Speedy Singhs if you want to see what Chak De! India would not have looked like even if it had gone terribly wrong.

Hari Om Entertainment Co. and Viacom 18 Motion Pictures’ Speedy Singhs (English) is designed to be a cross-cultural family comedy set in the Indo-Canadian community in Toronto in Canada. The film tracks a young man struggling between traditional Indo-Canadian family expectations and his dreams of becoming an ice hockey star.

Rajveer Singh (Vinay Virmani) is a young man dreaming of a career in the sport of ice hockey. He has cut off his hair in spite of being a Sikh, to fit into the society he lives in, much to the anger of his father, Darvesh Singh (Anupam Kher). His father wants him to look after the family business, currently being looked after by Rajveer’s paternal uncle, Sammy (Gurpreet Guggi).

Rajveer creates an all-Indian hockey team and names it Speedy Singhs. He gets a foreign coach to train the team and then asks his Sammy uncle’s truck company to sponsor the team. His own father is unaware of his moves.

What happens to the team? Is it able to face the competition of the other better teams? Is Rajveer Singh able to play in the final match? What about his father who has always been against him playing hockey? Answers to these questions are revealed in the end.

Speedy Singhs Review – Script Analysis

The story, penned by Vinay Virmani, Noel Barker, Jeffrey Schechter and Matt Simmons, is very similar to Chak De! India and Patiala House and, therefore, offers no novelty. Vinay Virmani’s screenplay is dull and devoid of any excitement whatsoever in spite of the film being about the game of hockey. What’s more, coming as it does after Chak De! India charmed the Indian audience, that too, with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead, this film looks like an apology of a film. The drama is dull and even the game of ice hockey is uninspiring. Dialogues are as dull as the rest of the drama.

Speedy Singhs Review – Star Performances

Vinay Virmani cuts a sorry picture of himself as he neither looks like a hero nor acts like one. Camilla Belle does an excellent job as Melissa Winters. Anupam Kher is nice. Sakina Jaffrey, as Darvesh Singh’s wife, Lovleen Singh, is quite okay. Rob Lowe acts very well as coach Dan Winters. Noureen Dewulf is average as Reena. Russell Peters is quite nice as Sonu. Gurpreet Guggi is hardly funny. Akshay Kumar plays himself in an insignificant role. Others barely fill the bill.

Speedy Singhs Review – Direction & Music

Robert Lieberman’s direction is dull, to say the least. He has not been able to capture the excitement of a sporting event. Even the emotional under-current of the drama is lost. Music (Sandeep Chowta and Anjjan-Harmeet-Manmeet of Meet Bros.) is ordinary. Lyrics pass muster. Steve Danyluk’s cinematography is okay. Susan Shipton’s editing is average. Dubbing is ordinary; pronunciations of Englsih words, especially by the artiste who has dubbed the dialogues of Reena, is often pathetic.

Speedy Singhs Review – Komal Nahta’s Verdict

On the whole, Speedy Singhs is a poor fare and will fail to make any mark at the box-office. The dubbed Hindi version of the film has also been released simultaneously and its box-office fate will be equally terrible.

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