15, 127 mins, Subtitles

Director: Anurag Kashyap

Stars: John Abraham, Ayesha Takia, Paresh Rawal

“Do you smoke after sex?” our chain-smoking hero asks his secretary in this latest attempt to push the Bollywood envelope. “I don’t know, I never looked, but I sweat,” she replies.

Opening with a dream sequence set in Siberia, this highly unconventional film follows K (John Abraham), who loves fags and admiring his own body more than that of his tubby wife Anjali (Ayesha Takia). When she leaves him, he is forced to check into The Laboratory, a quit smoking clinic run by Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal), in order to win her back.

Baba Bengali, a proud Adolf Hitler fan, adopts extreme measures to get his patients to quit the killer weed: he chops off a finger for each cigarette smoked post-treatment.

“A thousand people stop smoking everyday, by dying” the pre-title credits tell us but do not be fooled into thinking that this bizarre film’s agenda is to challenge the tobacco companies or point out the dangers of smoking. Director Anurag Kashyap is too busy trying to be clever and quirky by shamelessly ripping off ideas and sequences from as from his Western DVD collection.

Spotting what’s been stolen from where is really the only reason to watch this film K’s character is based on Joseph K from Franz Kafka’s classic novel, The Trial. Stephen King’s Quitters Inc, which featured as part of the 1985 horror flick Cat’s Eye, is also referenced.

Further, the entire climatic bath-gas chamber sequence from Speilberg’s Schindler’s List is duplicated (this provides a neat opportunity for fans of current hunk Abraham to ogle at length at his beautiful body, clad in briefs). There are odes to Lars Von Trier and surreal episodes that take place in K’s brain, which scream Being John Malkovich.

Over reliant on a leaden performance from the often semi-nude, male lead, it drags so much that by the end frustrated viewers may want to kick Kashyap’s butt.

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