A film that borrows heavily from Hollywood, what else is there to watch, but fast forward.

Contrary to its name Fast Forward is an amazingly slow placed and dull movie, saved only in bits in parts by some good dance sequences, which is after all what you’d like to see more of in a movie being promoted as a ‘dance movie’.

It’s influenced from the 2004 Hollywood movie You Got Served, where a group of dancers enter a dance contest to achieve their dreams of becoming a famous dance group, but is weakly adapted for Indian consumption. Even though You Got Served had a boring storyline its dance sequences were awe-inspiring to the extent that you’d go from ‘how the hell did he do that’ to ‘can people even move like that’. Unfortunately these robust dance moves were too difficult for the Indian actors to copy paste – except for Siddhanth who plays the baddie with the cool moves.

When it’s not the camera playing hullabaloo with its ugly close-ups and out of zoom frames from the first scene itself, the editing feels left behind and chips in with its tacky work. Result? Extreme close-ups of the leads, which you’d rather close your eyes too and scenes where you wonder the editor must have dozed off on the table.

In the leads there should have been dancers instead of actors, that would have been proper justice to the art, but since the makers wanted someone who could convey emotions too they chose actors (Rehan Khan and Akshay Kapoor). But I ask where the emotions are? Both of them try their best of look as close as professional be-bopping, hip-hopping dancers but they are not. This is Akshay's second movie of the month after Three and he seems like an actor who can deliver what’s required. Rehan continues on with his earlier performance.

The guy who steals the show from under their half-pants is Siddhanth Karnick who plays the leader of the bad brat pack. His entry makes a ‘rin ki safedi’ effect and his dance seems effortless and suave. Almost seems as if he did most of his dance takes in once go. This is his third release in a row after Yeh Mera India and Blue Oranges, and I’m sure there will be many more to come. A few more of his scenes would have definitely upped up the films ‘cool’ quotient, if Rehan and Akshay hadn’t gobbled up so much screen space.

The girls (Bhavna, Sabina) mark their attendance in a love song and a few scenes here and there. That’s all that was required of them. Bhavna’s nasal dialogue delivery gets irritating and you secretly wish for her character to be bumped off.

The choreography (Soniya Jaffer & Seema Desai) which in a movie like this is more important than the direction itself is based on the needs and competency of the actors. If you are going in expecting some mind boggling dance moves then that’s not going to happen. Probably you have already seen all sorts of dance techniques shown here while surfing music channels. What disturbs me that the ‘dance’ aspect of the film is given a backseat when typical Hindi melodramatic storyline and corny dialogues take over. Nowhere once has it been mentioned what is the type of dance (Krumping) that they do, how do they lean their moves and most importantly how do they innovate. It’s just taken for granted that they are good dancers and they can come up with random moves at three in the night, just as it’s taken for granted in any Bollywood movie that the hero can bash ten people at one go.

The winning performances shown in the movie don’t have an edge. You find yourself cheering more for the ‘bad team’ only to find out that the ‘good team' has a similar or a below average performance. So who wins? Naturally the good side, even though the others were better, because it says so in the script.

What many don’t know is that there was another Hollywood movie called Fast Forward released way back in 1985 (directed by Sidney Poitier) which had a similar theme of a group of dancers going to New York city to compete in a major dance competition. So much for an original name too.

Better to fast forward to the movies next week.

Aalekh Kapoor