Masand's Verdict: Hello | Accidental Husband

HELL-OH: Hello is so silly you can't help laughing even when you're not meant to.

Featured Blog

Rajdeep Sardesai

26/11: Terror comes precariously close

Featured Slideshows

Cast: Sharman Joshi, Sohail Khan, Eesha Koppikar, Gul Panag, Amrita Arora and Sharat Saxena

Director: Atul Agnihotri

There's a scene in Hello in which the six protagonists of the film are trapped in a car that's dangling precariously off the edge of a construction site. Death is imminent.

Until they are saved by a phone-call from God.

This one time — just this one time — you wish God had been busy attending to something more important, so the characters in this film had indeed plummeted down to a gruesome end. For one, it would have made this film at least fifteen minutes shorter. And two, it would have been a very fitting revenge for the agony these characters put you through just watching them go about their scenes in this terrible film.

Adapted from Chetan Bhagat's bestselling novel One Night at the Call Centre, Hello is an embarrassingly amateurish movie. Remember the kind of class plays one put up in the school quadrangle when one was 12?

This film is only a marginally more professional effort than that. The screenplay, written by Bhagat himself and the film's director Atul Agnihotri, is slipshod and contrived, and in fact it's so silly you can't help laughing even when you're not meant to.

The plot's focused on a group of six call-centre employees in Mumbai who're grappling with serious personal issues, and the life-altering experience they go through on this particular night-shift.

Starring Sharman Joshi as a call-centre team-leader in the making, and Sohail Khan, Eesha Koppikar, Gul Panag, Amrita Arora and Sharat Saxena as the members of his team, Hello makes it abundantly clear that attention-to-detail isn't top on its list of priorities.