Blue

**Film: Blue** **Director:** Anthony D'Souza **Producer:** Dhilin Mehta **Music composed by:** A. R. Rahman **Release date:** 16 October 2009 (UK) The film stars Sanjay Dutt, Akshay Kumar, Lara Dutta, Zayed Khan, and Rahul Dev. Katrina Kaif and Kabir Bedi appear in cameo appearances. **Review by Dr Usman Latif Khawaja** Peter Benchley wrote *The Deep* as well as *Jaws*, and *The Deep* had a morality which seeped through both the script and the scuba-diving adventure that Peter Yates moulded from the best-selling book. Set off the boisterous and charming beaches of Bermuda, a scuba-diving couple, played by Nick Nolte as a blond, frisky Yankee and his gorgeous wife, Jacqueline Bisset, are in search of an underwater bounty. They find not one but two, to mark a scalding adventure. One is a World War II ship stashed with morphine and a drugs haven, and the other an eighteenth-century French royal merchantman conveying crown jewels to France. They are, of course, immediately endangered by local thugs headed by Louis Gossett, who wants both treasures and has no qualms about acquiring either, from indulging in rape to murder to voodoo. But here comes the moral innuendo in the form of an excellent performer, played with gusto by Robert Shaw — a conscientious metaphor for the deep blue infinite sea, who is out to defeat the devil and makes sure that right shall triumph. The atmosphere created on land and on the yacht is both chilling and yet humorous, and the acting by all is convincing, to say the least, while the conniving villains are also quite decent despite the Jamaican stereotypes. The underwater sequences, with sharks infesting the vessels and the pyrotechnics, are spectacular and have never been seen after this endeavour to the same dextrous display of technical finesse. Yates was fortunate to have a great talent in Robert Shaw, who gives this tale of adventure a raw but definitive moral edge, and Bisset looks glamour galore, which can hail any ship from any high sea, from Bermuda to Bombay. The underwater adventure scores with a deadly, divine morality which is heart-warming, and the stunts are irrevocable, which can never be doubled. Now come to the Sanjay Dutt trash token by Bollywood, *Blue* — he plays Shaw, Akshay plays Nolte, and Lara plays Bisset, and that is called poor plagiarism in the worst taste possible. I am really ashamed that Bollywood even exists, as this is egregious art at its worst.