All India Rank Review: Tepid and slow-paced!

ALL INDIA RANK

Director: Varun Grover

Cast: Bodhisattva Sharma, Shashi Bhushan, Samta Sudiksha, Geeta Agarwal, Sheeba Chaddha, Neeraj, Ayush Pandey, Saadat Khan

Platform of Release- Theatres

Rating:

By Jyothi Venkatesh

The film revolves around the 17-year-old (Vivek) Bodhisattva Sharma, who leaves his hometown, Lucknow and ailing mother and goes to Kota to fulfil his father’s dream. Well, he is not at all interested in being in the race of IIT. But we see certain elements like financial stress, societal pressures and other things taking the front seat.

The movie reminds you of 12th Fail, Super 30, 3 Idiots and Kota Factory but unfortunately fails to deliver that kind of engaging content. The plot is very bland because though the adolescence stage shown in the film is most believable and also plausible, the problem lies with its ordinary direction and extremely sleep-inducing snail-paced narrative. There is hardly any progression in the story.

However, the positive side about the film is that since the film is set in the 90s era, the production design convincingly shows that nostalgic phase and takes you down memory lane.

Also read: Here’s how Nidhi Bisht fulfilled her father’s dream with her role in Maamla Legal Hai

As far as the performances are concerned, whether it is Bodhisattva Sharma as Vivek, Shashi Bhushan as father RK Singh or for that matter Geeta Agrawal Sharma as mother Manju Rani, each and every one plays his or her character with utmost sincerity and also with effortless ease. Also very commendable is the whip-smart Sarika (Sudiksha) who is brighter than most of the boys in the class.

All said and done, All India Rank fails to garner your attention despite having a runtime of just over 100 minutes and Varun Grover, stand-up comic-writer-lyricist who is known for his sharp writing, makes his directorial debut by decoding what is essentially just a tepid and slow paced sleep inducing quintessential middle-class dream, as a result of which the events in the film seem to be listless, monotonous and makes you automatically lost interest in what is happening in their lives.

It is sad that given Varun’s expertise in writing satire, the script feels gravely bland and uninspiring, and the storytelling manages to evoke boredom. On the whole, ‘All India Rank’ may tread familiar coming-of-age territory, as I mentioned earlier, but coming as it does after ‘12th Fail’, it is very much its own film and different from the clutter.