Checkmate : Finally a thriller that thrills
Murphy’s law (From Wiki):
“If there’s more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way.”
“Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” .
Murphy’s law , this is what one of the protagonist narrates at the very beginning of the movie, and what follows is almost proof to it.Checkmate tells a story of three young men from different backgrounds,duped by a fake financial company.They lose whatever money they had, money their family had earned ,the property they had, in short the only option they have is to recover their money in any damn possible way.So all three come together and plan , plan to recover their losses.The rest of the movie shows the execution of the plan and how each one of them tries to be the leader of the game.As the movie progresses , all the plots form a puzzle,you are dazzled,at times you don’t get the proceedings but you are hooked , you want to know more and in the end as they say all the plots fall in the right slots and you understand every bit of it.
Checkmate has style galore, but wait for a change we have a stylized movie with a soul, with a backbone, with almost a rock solid script. By almost i mean there are few glitches, but what the heck ,the positives are so many that they outshine the glitches.The movies moves back and forth through flashbacks and flashforwards.The flashforwards show the protagonist narrating the proceedings and his take on the behavior of other protagonists and how each of them judges each other and this according to me was pretty cool.The movie moves in a brisk pace and there are no songs and no unnecessary scenes to slow down the story.Yes there is a love angle,but it plays in background and without hampering the story adds up to the puzzle.All the actors live up to the script, and give tremendous performances.A special mention has to be given to Ankush Choudhary and Swapnil Joshi and of course there is Sanjay Narvekar, who as expected does a great job.
Above all the actors , above all the characters ,the main character is the camera ,it literally speaks to you and forms an integral aspect of the story.The camera work , cinematography is top notch and Sanjay Jadhav excels and surpasses himself as a camera man in Dombivili Fast.Sanjay Jadhav is also the director of the movie and transfers the screenplay perfectly on the screen.Sanjay Jadhav, the cinematographer, the director take a bow and thanks for giving me one of my fav marathi movie.i am eagerly waiting for your next venture.i have never seen such an accomplished narration and screenplay on marathi screen, i will go ahead and say it will kick some serious ass of bollywood thrillers……
Tags: check mate, checkmate, Marathi, sanjay jadhav
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
there was no buzz about this movie ..even valu had more buzz… despite checkmate having few ’stars’ of marahi cinema
i wanted to see this film for sanjay jadhav …
ANY BODY IN BOMBAY HAVING A SUBTITLED DVD OF THE SAME ??? PLSSSS
I wonder if someone will buy the rights for this and remake it, like how Abbas-Mustan are doing with “Dombivali Fast”.
saw the movie and really liked it lot..but then a friend told me its a copy of ek khiladi ek haseena…is that true??
its supposed to be a remake of Confidence…which in turn was remade into Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina…
had seen it at the pune film fest… got a good response… but it didnt get a good release…
The plot seems to be inspired from “Not A Penny More Not A Penny Less” by Jeffrey Archer.
Where can I watch it in Mumbai or any DVD..i dont need subs..I ll manage without it…can understand 95 pc marathi…being brought up here has helped..would love to watch “Tingya”.Ha d seen a good movie with sonali kulkarni in it..dont know the name but she was a chef in it..something unusual
shall see this one…i think somebody shud post bout the movie “tingya” as well…surprised to find nothing written bout a real good movie on PFC…
Saurav,
i think the movie with sonali kulkarni is restaurant…
sorry to say but i was not “thrilled” while watching this film.. the climax scene is too strenous and unbelievable. those location jumps were visible if you know pune. i prefer Valu to Checkmate.
@ karthik krishnan
Checkmate had better publicity and marketing than Valu amongst mainstream marathi audience. Valu had better buzz in festival circuit.
adding to the list of good contemporary marathi cinema.. Uttrayan, Vasudev Balwant Fadke. watch VBF for its cinematography.. anytime better than bollywood brats
Film theek hai…but the best part I liked in the film was the narration/introduction of Bharat Jadhav ( before the film, interval and after )
The film says “10 years after” – so there is bound to be a sequel ? Like after the policemen, Sanjay & Vinay Apte come out of Jail ?
One question…it it so happened before in Bolly/Holly that the first part and the sequel have been shot in one stretch, but released separately ?
Is there a way I can subscribe to only your reviews on the site?