Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Rana daggubatti, Sanjay Dutt, Vijay raaz, Abhimanyu singh, Anjana Sukhani.
Director: Ram Gopal Verma
Length: 2.20 hours approximately.
Using cameras in his own ways, Ram Gopal Verma has his own elegance of directing his films. he likes to shake his scene with zany camera angles. Well, its interesting to the point but Ram Gopal Verma goes beyond zenith this time. The plot offers nothing new and the treatment is irritating, resulting in an awfully bad film. Smartness is something what DEPARTMENT should have looked for, but its dumb and silly. Some scenes, unintentionally, pushes laugh out of you.
The first half of the film is nothing less than watching a nightmare. One after the other unexciting action scenes are placed and without any glimpse of a story. Not a single sequence takes the story ahead, because the attention is kept on dialogues which Sanjay Dutt delivers with weird diction. As soon as Amitabh Bachchan makes his entry, there's some hope of something to happen, but that never happens! His opening scene is humorous but then it's simply not about the story. RGV gives you unnecessary knowledge about disguised intentions of Vijay Raaz's henchmen which adds to heights of boredom. Also the intermission point is equally bad where Dutt and Rana shares some conversation which is far from even giving a teaser on what the second half will be. Upon that, there's couple of party dance in first half which are highly unappealing. What a terrible waste of time!
Second half has some countable good sequences, but even here the film isn't engaging because you learn that DEPARTMENT's story, for which you're waiting from the start, is very cliched and pedestrian. Double crossing, kidnapping, threatening is all what post-intermission contains. Not entirely bad, second half has couple of turns which raises some momentum but for restrictive period. But again in last 20 minutes, the film slows down and ends up with a very bad finale.
RGV's direction is poor and he manages to pull the film to 140 minutes despite of having such story and plot. For once, the film could have been at-least watchable had the director would have not messed up with the plot, because he creates too much of confusion by adding different characters. Music is poor, though, "Kammo" track is good. Not much on cinematography as there's nothing great in Mumbai which is not shown before. Dialogues are really bad and some are unintentionally funny. Also, Dutt delivers some of them in a very funny way which again makes comedy. Action scenes are nothing great because mostly are gun fights. The importance is much towards blood and gore rather than scripting and treatment!
Amitabh bachchan is the only appreciable one in the whole film. He has a good role to do, but sadly his role is very limited. Rana Daggubatti could have done a lot better especially because he has given such a sharp performance in DUM MAARO DUM. Sanjay Dutty fails miserably on all count. Vijay Raaz has some funny liners, but his role is very badly sketched. Rest all has limited scope and none of them leaves even modicum impression on viewers.
Its that kind of film where everything goes bad. It could have been a gripping fare if the story would have been well written and if GRV would have not spoiled with his poor strategy of using cameras. Watch it to challenge yourself!
Rating- 1.5/5 (Poor)
