But there are moments where Nawaz overcomes the sketchy characterisation - like that immediate impulse to pull out handcuffs from his uniform’s back pocket reveals the police officer never left his subconscious.Īs his former colleague, Vidya Balan is in sublime form. Terrific as he is, he cannot hide his own incredulity over the said move and the embarrassment only amplifies every time he’s made to crack a stupid joke.

In his tweaked take on the original, Dasgupta throws in some new characters and addresses different repercussions of guilt - one that afflicts Nawaz so much, he gives up his cop uniform to slip into a clergyman’s. Also, there’s something unnaturally meticulous about Bachchan’s overdesigned abode or the ones he breaks into. Unlike Te3n producer Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani, which accesses Kolkata’s culture, quirks and flavours to mirror the inner chaos of, and drama surrounding, his leading protagonist, the imagery here, well shot as it may be (by Tushar Kanti Ray), replete with mandatory festivals and landmarks, is purely for effect. The talent involved –Amitabh Bachchan, Vidya Balan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui –do their best to elevate what’s on paper whilst Dasgupta’s opaque play of timelines injects momentary butterflies into the proceedings. I had the same issues with its dreary source Montage, another South Korean thriller involving an abducted minor following Seven Days (Jazbaa) and The Man From Nowhere (Rocky Handsome), of which Te3n is an official and occasionally superior remake. The upshot is regrettably dull, staggeringly questionable and falls short of a satisfying suspense.

In its preoccupation to collect details, it flounders on motive. It would be effective too if the film wasn’t so wilfully minimizing its drama and dynamism to conceal the obvious. In Ribhu Dasgupta’s Te3n, the leisurely movement isn’t so much to examine the scene of crime, as it is to document the accumulation of evidence. At what pace a story wants to unravel is entirely the storyteller’s prerogative –some narratives speak in poetic pauses and cryptic musings others succeed on a throbbing tempo.

Te3n 2016 rediff review