Spoilers ahead...
Loosely based on real life Amartya Rao (John Abraham) who from a lower middle class status rises up to become a famous gangster taking over the areas Gaitonde (Amole Gupte) rules, thereby having the control over Mumbai becoming Bhau's (Mahesh Manjrekar) main man. Encounter specialist Savarkar (Emraan Hashmi) takes it upon himself to finish the chapter of Amartya Rao.
Off-late most of the gangster (real or fiction) based hindi movies follows a similar template, lots of punchlines, many one to one fight sequences, item number and eventually cop triumphs over the criminal. Almost all of these films lack one thing, no connection between the events, same happens in Mumbai Saga, there are few seeti maro kind dialogues delivered by leads or even other cast, Amartya vs Savarkar fight scenes specially the well edited washroom one but none of these make any impact because the characters aren't layered. No work is done on any of them because the story just moves in one note which is Amartya has to become the top gangster and then Savarkar has to kill him. Infact it felt funny how Savarkar character out of blue gets introduced after more than half film is gone and starts killing Amartya's men one by one. We know nothing about Savarkar's past life, even his motive to earn money by killing Amartya is challenged by his own long Singham kind speech making you wonder did he change his stance and become a police officer who is bound by the duty or was he faking it earlier. You never would find the answers because the writing team didn't bother.
The only plus point apart from Emraan Hashmi's acting (its hard to not like him even in a bad film) was that the loud screeching dialogue scenes we saw in trailer were thankfully the only ones in the film too, so we do get saved from that torture. However, the use of slow motion and extreme close ups is done in excess, no respite on that front.
I would even have loved some backdrop on why Bombay became Mumbai, with Bhau who clearly was playing Thackeray in here. Aneways, Sanjay Gupta just wanted to show non-stop action and even have a character of Seema (Kajal Aggarwal), girlfriend of Amartya who would in whole story support him in every violent act. Even the brotherly act of Amartya and Arjun (Pratiek Babbar, I almost struggled to recognise him) didn't work because again you didn't bother to develop these characters. Amole Gupte seemed to be enjoying his performance which felt like an extension of Bhope Bhau from Kaminey. And there's a blink and miss scene involving Sunil Shetty, no idea why they needed him for this scene.
My Rating : 4/10
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