The soul of Aamir Khan's new release Ghajini can be summed up in the very first scene where at the end of a fast-paced beat-up, Aamir stabs a guy in the gut with a broken off water-pipe, tap included. A feeble mind could conjecture that this would cause some bleeding. One would even suggest the addition of a shot of the tap being opened producing a torrent of gore, a simple act that would have worked wonders to establish the film's credentials as a violent revenge drama of the top echelon. What we get is a curiously bloodless act, and a film that makes some of the 80's Jeetendra vengeance south style starrers or even 1989's Tezaab look like “Mad Max 2 meets City of The Dead Totally Unrated Edition”. There's just no satisfaction here.

After that opening, we see Aamir waking up in his flat and going to the bathroom where he takes off his shirt. You'll be seeing an embarrassing lot of that in this film. Tired of people's snide remarks about his underwhelming portrayal of a commando in Baazi, Mr. Khan has spent lots of extra time in the gym to look the badass for this film. He also has a crew cut with a fancy scar design and a permanent scowl. The sum total of these developments serve to accentuate his REALLY BIG EARS, and make him look like an ad for Isabgol. He expresses his bowel frustrations by yelling and waving his arms about, which make him look cute and hilarious.

Aamir's character also has “short term memory loss (STML)” and can remember things for only 15 minutes at a time, so he needs to take pictures and notes of everything. Given the monster-size plot holes in the film, this appears a contagious malaise transmitted also to writer-director A. Murugadoss and most other members of the cast. Apparently Mr. Isabgol was once not constipated but the well-heeled well-boweled honcho of a huge-ass UK based cellphone company. This early part of the film (referred to in diary entries that make Dracula's epistles seem spare and laconic) would have you believe that no one in India knows what this multi-millionaire NRI eligible bachelor with bulging pecs looks like. If one could only credit the Indian press with any sense of restraint, this might have been attributed to a reluctance to give coverage to some one who exclusively shops at Messrs. Reid & Faggot.

Hereon, Reid & Faggot falls for a girl with a personality that suggests the scraping of fingernails on a blackboard (Asin), even pretending to be a penniless aspiring model that would do underwear shoots to get a break. After what seems like some 7 hours worth of Asin-ine pratfalls, the STML afflicted script finally gets around to telling you how the clouds of darkness shrouded our hero's life of sunshine and regular shits - His girlfriend gets (for all practical purposes) bloodlessly bludgeoned by an evil punju named Ghajini. This is of course something that everyone in the audience already knows from looking at the posters showing Aamir's tattooed torso. I know it's the telling that matters, but there's something rank and obscene about the time this film takes just to return you to square one.

Hi-ho then, Mr. Isabgol wants nothing more than to gut Ghajini and relieve his constipation. Somewhere in this mix is the most clueless medical student in this world (Jiah Khan). Initially interested in Isabgol as a case study (she seems to pretty much ignore her actual studies), she ends up helping him in his quest to hunt down the big G. This leads to the climax which, with its focus on hand-to-hands and bad guys somersaulting away in every which direction, is one of the few exciting segments of this otherwise foot-to-mouth venture. There would have been more of a cause celebre if it had been arranged for Ms. Medical Student to undergo a live autopsy. Sadly, like with the rest of Ghajini, we are left frustrated.