India Vs England film review: Obtuse telling of an obscure tale

Director: Nagathihalli Chandrashekhar

Cast: Vashishta N Simha, Manvitha Kamath, Anant Nag, Gopal Kulkarni, Prakash Belawadi, Sumalatha Ambareesh, Sadhu Kokila

So what forced the man who made Undu Hoda Kondu Hoda, Baa Nalle Madhuchandrake, America America and many more films give us this, his most disappointing film in a career spanning three decades? Prolific writer and renowned filmmaker Nagathihalli Chandrashekhar's India Vs England --which has nothing to do with cricket--is like a match in which both teams lose. How? Well, it’s as strange as that.

The tale is spun around a rare, authentic blue diamond which gets smuggled and gets entangled in the lives of a vlogger, a gemologist and his apprentice.

The film pretends to deliver a grand message: while British rule in India was significant, our nation now has to do a different kind of battle with England post our Independence, to win true freedom. While that is what the film-maker pretends to teach us, the message utterly fails to come through on screen.

Moving away from cinematic theory, the movie offers very little by way of entertainment. There are hardly any thrilling moments that a movie of this nature desperately needs to break the tedium. So it ends up being infotainment, a commodity that is readily available to the common man through various media.

Apart from Anant Nag, the cast leaves no impression on us. In short, the tale runs along with the smuggled blue diamond plot, interconnecting the roles of Kanishka, the vlogger played by Vashishta N Simha, and Medhini, played by Manvitha Kamath, an apprentice and caretaker of her grandfather, played by Anant Nag, a gemologist. Who gets the diamond and how is the eventual outcome.

The unbearable comedy track makes it worse. Several 'unbelievable' scenes like Medhini finding a ruby by just scooping up some debris are ready material for parody. This is a forgettable one from Nagathihalli Chandrashekhar.