DIRECTOR: Rohit Shetty

In Sundays line-up are three of Hindi cinema’s finest when it comes to comic timing, Irrfan Khan, Arshad Warsi and Vrajesh Hirjee. There's also Ajay Devgan, who can underplay to great advantage. And Ayesha Takia, who displays an unexpected talent for mimicry, doing voices which range from a demented Nepali housemaid to an African lion. And a storyline which has a corpse, a crazed killer, a kooky karate expert, a mildly corrupt cop, a batty taxi driver, and his desperate-to-be-a-star companion. And a girl suffering from amnesia.

So what does Rohit Shetty do with this lot in his new film, the remake of a Telugu superhit? Loses the plot, that's what. The script lurches through a series of loosely shot scenes with little or no connectivity, leaving you to draw consolation from the stray sequences in which Irrfan and Arshad shine: the former does a whole series of snappy impersonations in the back seat of a chilly red Ambassador taxi, and the one that is the funniest involves a madly popular nasally-inclined singer-turned-actor in a blue baseball cap, who goes by the name of Himesh Bhai.

But mostly you are left with this — Rajveer Randhawa, (Ajay) chomping on ice cream cones, extracting hafta from petty shopkeepers, and drinking glassfuls of free lassi from a shop which looks as if it is in Surajkund, all colourful Rajasthani buntings, and fake rustic chairs. He and his cronies hang out in police stations which look like sprawling MP bungalows. Just so you don't miss the point (the film is set in Delhi), all kinds of all kinds of identifiable locations are thrown in, like, you know, Rajpath, Rashtrapati Bhavan, Connaught Place, the narrow lanes of Chandni Chowk, and even, oh my, Daryaganj.

Seher (Ayesha) lives in a redbrick apartment block, drives a scooty to work, and makes noises in front of a mike for a living. Suddenly, a Sunday goes missing from her memory, and her tape recorder is full of sinister sounds. Cue for Rajveer to ride to the rescue, and for the movie, which ought to have been a zany thriller-cum-caper, to rapidly turn into a drudge.

The director's previous film, Golmaal, was a make-no-bones-about-it mindless comedy. Sunday is neither a thriller, nor a comedy.

Eastern Promises

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl

DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg

With Eastern Promises, the Oscar season has officially begun in India, and this film fits Academy Awards 2008's mood of unapologetically grim dramas.

Over steaming dishes, shining cutlery, elaborate dinners and a rainy Christmas at a popular London restaurant, Cronenberg builds a tale of inescapable menace and improbable humanity involving a generous restaurant owner-cum-ruthless Russian mafia lord (Mueller-Stahl), his miserable son (Cassel) and an underling who is cleverly stepping into the gap (Mortensen).

The shades of Godfather are hard to miss here, though the Vory V Zakone family is of course much smaller than the Corleones.

In the midst of this, a midwife working at the local hospital (Watts) literally rides in. She has stumbled onto their secrets thanks to a diary she recovered from a dying 14-year-old. It leads Anna first to the restaurant Trans-Siberia, and then to the dark world of the Russian/Chechen mafia where girls from the former Soviet Union are lured to the West with promises and then sucked into prostitution and exploitation.

The girl whose diary Anna recovers died during child birth. It is while trying to find out who to hand over the child to that she gets involved in the matter. Having lost her own baby to a miscarriage, Anna feels particular affinity with the girl.

Cronenberg conveys effectively the collision between the two worlds, while working on the notion that “all monsters are sentimental and have some kind of relationship to a moral compass”. So even as he chops the fingers of a man they have just ordered killed, Mortensen's Nikolai or even his bosses don't just finish Anna off and take the diary.

On one side is the mafia boss and his family, and on the other, Anna's mother and uncle as determined to protect her. Cassel's Kirill, drunk and desperate to show he is worth his family name, is all about his father, as much as Anna in her delicate state counts on her mother.

As for Mortensen, who has been nominated for best actor for his role, he looks as different as he possibly ever will from The Lord of the Rings. The heroic, luminous Aragorn of Rings is oily, dark and cold here. He conveys little by way of emotion, knows what he has to do, and goes quietly about doing it.

Dependent on Kirill to get him into the mob, Nikolai indulges his stupidities and then quietly, as roles change, shows who is the boss.

Thanks to the Censors, you may not get to see parts of that, though. Scenes have been inexplicably and abruptly chopped here, while the other two releases of the week — Rambo IV and Aliens and Predators 2 — apparently went about toting up bodies.

While Mortensen has got the meatier role and now the Oscar nod, it would be unfair not to acknowledge Cassel's performance, always trying to be what he is not. When the cards are all on the table, watch as he almost gratefully rests his head on Nikolai's shoulders.

Rambo

CAST: Sylvester Stallone

director: Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz

If Rocky could make a comeback after 16 years, why not Rambo after 10? If Vietnam and Afghanistan have been the backdrops before, why not Myanmar? If Stallone, old, bloated and stiff as they come, can still pack a punch, why not?

But why? Rambo IV has little to add to the franchise except that it takes you on a boat ride from Thailand to Myanmar, and will probably be the only Hollywood film to be based on that forgotten country.

But it isn't democracy that Rambo is trying to restore here. He just kills hundreds (it could be less, or more) of Burmese soldiers, and saves a few women from gangrape, for three American aid workers who thought they could just waltz in, dispense some Bible knowledge and few free medicines and walk out. Where have they been? Bhutan? Nobody mentions Aung San Su Kyi.