Jail Movie Reviews

It's the real world for Madhur Bhandarkar. And nothing but the real world. The filmmaker who is wedded to reality in terms of cinema, turns his attention from bars girls, page 3 people, traffic lights and fashion grime to the sordid interiors of Indian jails. And once again, he manages to create a hard-hitting canvas peopled with characters who manage to both disturb and touch your heart with their stories of distress. More importantly, the film raises important questions

Madhur Bhandarkar is synonymous with thought-provoking, hard-hitting films. Right from CHANDNI BAR to FASHION, the expert storyteller has made movies that hold tremendous shock-value. In turn, Madhur has cultivated a rich fan-base for his films. With JAIL, Madhur not only makes you visit a prison, but also makes you peep into the psyche of a prisoner. In the recent past, Sriram Raghavan's EK HASINA THI

It is dark, distressing and deeply disturbing, like most, Madhur Bhandarkar films. After feeble attempts with TRAFFIC SIGNAL and FASHION, Madhur roars in form once again. JAIL will have you thinking. The National Award winning director, this time focuses on the tragic lives of those behind bars. The brokenness they have to deal with, the foolishness of that 'one-second anger' that led to murder, which they are now regretting or even how the innocent battle for justice. If you have an appetite for hardcore reality cinema, 'This Is It'!

Madhur Bhandarkar switches to low-key from his usual high-pitch, and turns effective. It’s his treatment that glosses over the fact that `Jail’ has neither a novel plot, nor denouement. Parag (Mukesh) is picked by an anti-narcotics team in the worst possible way: there’s a stash of high-quality, high-priced drugs in his car, flung in the backseat by his flatmate, grievously injured in a shoot-out. The crooked dealer goes into the ICU

Despite its grim setting, director Madhur Bhandarkar's Jail is his least cynical film in years. Neil Nitin Mukesh stars as Parag Dixit, an innocent man implicated for a crime he didn't commit. Much of the film is centered around Parag's frustration and helplessness as he struggles to stay sane and alive amidst hardened criminals. Like the director's earlier films, Corporate, Traffic Signal and Fashion, his latest too is a slice-of-life drama about the characters

The exterior façade of Central Jail has been a significant setting in Hindi films with characters making exit from it for years now. But beyond that, Bollywood has had quite a conventional portrayal of the prison. Madhur Bhandarkar’s depiction of Jail goes beyond the clichéd images of chakki-peesing prisoners and convicts rupturing rocks in films. But then again the film lacks the Bhandarkar brand of shocking eye-openers.

In Jail, director Madhur Bhandarkar constructs a Kafkaesque nightmare. Parag Dixit, an upper-middle class, corporate man, played by Neil Nitin Mukesh, is circumstantially implicated in a drug bust and lands up in jail. However, Bhandarkar explores Parag’s horrific predicament with such little rigour, that Jail never becomes more than a well-intentioned but muddle-headed film. Jail begins well enough with Parag taking his first steps into prison

Let alone the characters in his movies, it may be safe to suggest that the director of this film is a bit of a character himself. His filmography reads self-explanatory, terse titles like Corporate, Fashion, Traffic Signal etc. Every few weeks in the press, he threatens to expose some industry or the other: Hospital, Award, Courtroom, Cricket, some such. There is general unease around depiction of urban life in the films. Either the filmmaker doesn’t get it at all

Denied bail and, more frustratingly, a chance to utter a word in court in his defence for close to a year, a hapless Parag Dixit (Neil Nitin Mukesh) lets loose his pent-up anger, bashing up a rich kid whose VIP connections have worked in acquitting him in a hit-and-run case. The criminal walks free, the innocent is holed up in solitary confinement without food and water for days. The scene ripples with pressure-cooker tension, Parag’s angst is palpable

As is often the problem with Madhur Bhandarkar's 'spotlight on society' films which merely take headlines and weave them together, Jail is yet another simplistic and superficial look at the world of an inmate. In this case, Parag (Mukesh) is wrongly accused in a drug possession case and incarcerated with hardened criminals convicted for murder, manslaughter, fraud, etc. On the outside, Parag's girlfriend Mansi (Godse) enlists the services

Scene one: hero enters jail. Last scene: hero is set free. There is not much in Jail in between. Except for a few interesting scenes, some decent performances, and the Madhur Bhandarkar touch, the film requires a lot of effort to be watched. The director, though, lends his typical style to the proceedings by presenting the film in a manner that has become synonymous with Bhandarkar films -- hard-hitting scenes, some very real characters

Over the years, Madhur Bhandarkar has taken cinegoers into many areas of life, which common people may not have ordinarily witnessed. The dance bars of Mumbai, page 3 parties, corporate world and life around a traffic signal are some. This time around he picks jail, the one place no one would ever want to visit, which is a bit like this film. Sure, Jail is well-made, but the subject itself is just too depressing and dreary to serve as entertainment

ail inmates talk to each other in voiceovers as the opening credits start rolling. Taking us to right where the action is, we see the interiors of a jail with accused Parag Dixit (Neil) pushed, shoved to a corner and brutally interrogated. Flashback scenes reveal that Dixit is falsely implicated in a drug case and has been ordered to spend two years in jail. Today, guilty as charged, Parag comes from an educated background with a successful career in marketing

The detailing is shoddy, the characters cardboard and the dialogue plain laughable. Jail is a formulaic, below average Bollywood headache, slowed down to lugubrious dullness. So much so that even ever-disastrous background score man Amar Mohile ditches his overloud hoo-ha for some insipid piano tinkling. Groan. Leave it be, this prison of cardboard and cliche. We all deserve better.