‘Prince’ makes the cut - Movie Review
April 13, 2010
Starring Vivek Oberoi, Nandana Sen, Neeru Singh, Aruna Shields, Sanjay Kapoor, Dalip Tahil
Prince starts out as a stylistic pastiche of great Hollywood action/sci-fi flicks—particularly The Matrix and the James Bond series—and while blatant and slapdash, it’s not entirely objectionable. What is objectionable is the awful dialogue and overdone CGI. The film’s saving grace, though, is a tried-and-true Hollywood action-thriller plot device: the MacGuffin, as Alfred Hitchcock termed it. The MacGuffin is simply a coveted object, the pursuit of which is the central conflict and source of suspense. In North By Northwest (1959), the MacGuffin is a microfilm containing government secrets. In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), it’s the Ark of the Covenant. In Prince, the MacGuffin is a gold coin with a microchip inside that can erase human memory and replace it with another version. Although it’s counterintuitive, the less detail given about the MacGuffin the more believable it is. In Prince, however, there’s far too much detracting explanation of the powers of the gold coin.
The choice of the MacGuffin—a gold coin—and the name of the main character—Prince—are nice mythic touches in an otherwise slickly modern movie. Prince (Vivek Oberoi) is a high-tech thief who wakes up one morning in his gorgeous home in South Africa with a gunshot wound and amnesia—but he still has his butt-kicking muscle memory. The premise is less similar to The Bourne Identity (2002) than it sounds. Prince’s butler tells him he works for a mobster named Sarang, played by a model-turned-actor known as Isaiah, who has tremendous presence, despite having little to do in the film expect look cool and dangerous. Prince also learns he has a girlfriend named Maya and he encounters three women claiming to be her (Neeru Singh, Nandana Sen, and Aruna Shields), each with a different story about who he is, and he’s not sure which one to believe. Sarang and two Indian government agents, Colonel Khanna (Dalip Tahil) and Officer Khan (Sanjay Kapoor), are after Prince because they believe he’s in possession of the gold coin, which he must find himself since he doesn’t remember what he did with it.
Oberoi isn’t in top form here. Instead of appearing confused by memory loss, he just seems tired. Perhaps he was weary of his female co-stars, who are nowhere near good enough to appear opposite him, even when he’s subpar (Singh is the only one who does a decent job). But as the story progresses, Oberoi settles into his character and finds his groove, and the film, likewise, gels in the second half, helped by the strong (and very sexy) musical number, “Tere Liye.”
Prince is rated Worth Watching.
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