A thriller with cyber crime as a backdrop was never tried in Hindi cinema. ‘Mickey Virus’ does the ribbon-cutting for this. What‘s in the store?
Mickey Arora (Manish Paul) is a hacker, along with his three other friends (Floppy, Pancho and Chutney) who are also hackers and their room actually looks like a computer-gaming arena for kids. Yes that’s our ‘Bollywood’ style computers used for hacking, and the speciality is, you can hack anything under the sky, in seconds. The ‘heroine’ (Elli Avram as Kamayani) then makes an entry in a vegetable market in a ‘Savita Bhabhi’s attire. Mickey instantly falls in love, as she resembles closely with a virtual computer character called ‘Kung Fu Chameli’ he created. Meanwhile, the ACP, Siddhant (Manish Chaudari) hires Mickey to crack a cyber crime case. Mickey doesn’t take the task seriously, until he realizes, he has been put in a treacherous trap. The rest of the movie is the motives behind the trap and how Mickey survives it.
The biggest ‘virus’ of the movie is its first half, which makes the audience ‘Not Responding’ for a long time. It starts working only after a ‘reboot’ (interval). Unfortunately, by that time, enough has already been ‘affected’. The ‘virus’ of this movie, I am referring to is the writer/director Saurabh Verma’s obsession with ‘Savita Bhabhi’. Saurabh spends too much time on the love-track where the self-indulgence dominates the story (as if his childhood dream was to bring Savita Bhabhi from the Internet to the silver-screen).
The well-made thriller part kicks off only after the interval, and compensates to an extent for the damage already done. The twists are interesting and the way things unfold keeps you hooked to the seats. The convincing performances of Manish Chaudari and Varun Badola are the other assets of the movie. On the contrary, Manish Paul gives a very ordinary performance for a role which had so much scope. A nice opportunity wasted!
‘Mickey Virus’ could have hit the bulls-eye if the director had restrained from giving a tribute to Savitha Bhabhi, and paid attention to the core of the movie. A one-time watch for the well-made second-half though.
(Warning: ‘Mickey Virus’ is hazardous to the real-life hackers, as they might develop suicidal feelings seeing the way; the movie has portrayed ‘hacking’ as a child’s play)
Reviewed by Rag Mayur
