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Contract is a must watch to see how far has RGV fallen. RGV has always known to make movies based on reality. This time he has decided to an autobiographical touch to the movie. In Contract there’s an underworld Don called Goonga (Upyendra Limaye), who relentlessly makes plans after plans using someone else’s money and all the plans are termed super-flop by everybody involved and yet he gets funding again and again. Pretty much the story of RGV these days.

Many people (including yours truly) have been accusing RGV of losing his touch and making senseless flicks. As if to answer all such critics, RGV decided that he’ll go back to his basics and make a movie using the classic Satya as a template. So let’s see run a checklist shall we?

- A brooding hero who never smiles and never shaves - check;
- A bearded lawyer who bails the hero out from jail - check;
- The hero gets recruited in the gang in a jail-fight - check;
- A hero jiske age peeche koi nahin - double check;
- A poor man’s item song - check;
- A wife who’s constantly whining and screaming her head off - check (there are two of them here God help our eardrums);
- A gang war - check. — the list goes on and on..

So if it’s like Satya, then the movie should be a pleasure to watch right? Wrong! Satya stuck a chord with each one of us and made us empathise with the characters. Remember Bhiku Mathre and his wife in a small, but powerful scene; or the way the beautiful way the love story between Satya and Vidya was portrayed. But in this movie all that emotional touch is missing.

In Contract, the hero Aman, (Adhvik Mahajan) decides to take the plunge into the underworld to break the nexus between the underworld and terrorism. He is recruited by the Mumbai police in an Infernal Affairs like manner to work undercover in the gang of RD (Sumeet Nijhawan) so that our hero can get to the main terrorist Sultan (Zakir Hussain). In a novel twist there’s no moll of the Don, but he has a sister Iya, (Sakshi Gulati) who promptly falls in love with the hero.

No doubt it’s quite a strong plot to make a nice, hard hitting movie. But unfortunately, you don’t give a damn about the characters and where their lives are heading. It seemed like RGV was just overseeing the entire movie with a sense of detachment, not really being involved in the movie making process. As a result the audience sees the movie but does not get attached to any of the characters.

In fact what could be a not bad movie is constantly littered with highly irritating elements. The love track between Aman and Iya starts with ‘Secrets’ which at first seemed to be endearing. Then they repeat the same thing for half a dozen times making us go batty. The rise of Aman in RD gang is shown in a meaningless collage. RD’s main rival is Goonga whose biggest problem in life is his wife who forever screams all over the place. Her pitch in some scenes is so high that it can only be heard by bats and dogs. No doubt it’s some new strategy of RGV to go beyond humans as the target audience. KJo and YRF target the NRI crowd and RGV targets the animal kingdom. And keeping trend with the latest RGV avatar as Baba RGV, there are a lot of Zenisms thrown in the guise of dialogues. Faisle galat nahin hote, nateeje galat hote hain; Main jagah se nahin, Dimag se Kaam karta hoon; Paani sochtha nahi, behta hai. As RGV says in his blog, even ill give an award to the person who’ll tell me the reference to context of the last dialogue.

The only redeeming factors are that this time round the camera angles are not all over the place. The movie briefly comes to life when action director Alan Amin takes over during the action sequence between Aman and Goonga and the climax fight sequence. The sequence of Aman chasing a stark naked encounter cop through the galis of Mumbai was hillarious and well crafted. But these nice moments are very few in number. Only the irritating factors is what that stays with you at the end of the movie. And to make the matters worse, there’s a hint of a sequel which will be having a Superhero who cleans up the entire root of the Mumbai underworld. God Save our Souls. A definite let-down by RGV.