Kalank - Ek Dhoka

Dharma Productions did impress a lot of people when the trailers released, allowing a lot of speculations and fan theories. However, the real film failed to garner a lot of audience attention with not praise but a lot of memes being released about the film's plot.

I'm going to try very hard to keep this spoiler free.

To not be biased and completely derogatory, we aren't going to call the film a complete disaster because it wasn't one. The movie does look stunning and very picturesque. With the golden highlights and visuals, especially the very eye-warming star cast, Kalank did have its positive moments. The scenery and the setting of the movie does manage to sweep hearts, simply due to the golden and shimmery glow, lovely complementing of colors and the oh-so-attractive people. However, that wasn't enough.

The star cast could only do so much, but they couldn't redeem the highly predictable story. The story, a tragic one at that, could have been a hit in the 1990s, considering that it was the theme of lovers dying in the film scripting of the time. With the current audience and with the huge exposure to movies, the plot became too predictable and there was hardly anything surprising.

Few people have compared the story of Kalank with those of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's films, due to the similarity in the visuals. Although, we need to take into account that Bajirao Mastani and Padmaavat were both historical stories, whose stories were known to the public. It wasn't a guarded secret. As a result people accepted that you couldn't alter the story and distort it to make the characters eternal.

However, the music sounded great when the tracks were released for everyone to hear, and apart from Zafar's First Class, the other videos for the songs turned out to be not so first class.

Though Kalank, quite literally begins with the prospect of a character's death (morbid, yes) it tries desperately to immortalize a few of the others, even though they have very platonic and flat personalities, and for some reason, know no fear. Quite impropable and boring, actually.

Getting to the characters, though there were many, some of them didn't get to contribute much. The film chiefly focused on Varun Dhawan's Zafar and Alia Bhatt's Roop. Aditya Roy Kapur's Dev, though was the reason why Roop came into the city where she fell in love, wasn't used up to his complete potential. Sonakshi Sinha's character was dull and depressing, granted that she was dying and death is no joking matter. Sanjay Dutt and Madhuri Dixit weren't pivotal to the plot at all. Apart from being the scandalous couple who fell in love, who were torn by society, they did not do much, or give the script more substance. For some reason, the film just felt like the star cast had been roped in to make up for the lack of story.

In short, the movie probably ended up being a Kalank on their careers, specifically referring to its box office runs.