READY 6.5*

Direction               : Anees Bazmee

Production            : Rajat Rawail, Bhushan Kumar, Nitin Manmohan, Kishan Kumar, Sohail Khan

Distribution           : T-Series, Rawail Grandsons Entertainment and Software Pvt. Ltd., Sohail Khan Productions

Story                    : Gopimohan

Music                   : Pritam, Devi Sri Prasad

Cinematography   : Sunil Patel, Thomas Xavier

Editing                  : Ritesh Soni

Cast                     : Salman Khan, Asin, Arya Babbar, Paresh Rawal, Puneet Issar, Mahesh Manjrekar, Akhilendra Mishra

Story:

Pooja aka Sanjana Singh (Asin) runs away from her evil uncles who want to steal all her properties by marrying her to either of their songs. She confronts with Prem (Salman Khan) and eventually they love each other. But Sanjana’s uncles find her and take her away. Prem uses his brains and starts the bluff game. How he marries his girl by making her uncles realize their mistakes is the rest of the story.

Analysis:

Ready is a remake of Telugu hit movie with the same name. Ram, a rising hero played the lead role in it. Salman Khan, who is a superstar, chose to do this role after setting box office on fire with Danbangg. It would be hard for Salman’s mass fans to see him in a sober role which hardly needs to flex his muscles. Especially it will be even harder to accept him in such an ineffective role after that iconic Chulbul Pandey act.

Adding to this director Anees Bazmee’s lackluster screenplay in the first hour made Ready a boring fare. Salman tried his best to infuse life into it but only did in very few instances. Bazmee changed the first half scenes from the original to make it suit to the tastes of Bollywood audience. Although the original’s first hour wasn’t up to the mark it was engaging and in contrast to the second hour which helped big time.

Anees Bazmee tried to make Ready a fulltime entertainer by having too much family drama and so called entertainment in the first half. However, he missed a golden chance of giving the much needed action and mass masala to Salman fans by changing the scenes from the original. Bazmee should have stuck to the original and might have bettered it as he has a superstar at his service. Instead he tried to stick to his image of churning mindless comic capers and that didn’t help for Ready’s course. Most importantly he ruined the character of Paresh Rawal’s which was played by Brahmanandam in the original. For Ready in Telugu this character is the heart and soul and Bazmee failed to understand it.

He retained most of the scenes from the original in second half and few of those worked too. Anees Bazmee tries too hard to make audiences laugh by including vulgar jokes which is absolutely not needed. He could have hired a good translator and translated all the good and neat jokes from the original. Ready, on a whole works only in parts. All the changes that the director brought in prove the fact that he is out of form at the moment.

Dhinka Chika and Character Dheela songs are the saving grace along with Salman’s stunning screen presence. Few jokes here and there worked but Ready is just below the average mark as a wholesome film.

Salman Khan and Ajay Devgon in Ready

Salman and Asin in Ready

Salman Khan in movie Ready

Ready Hindi movie Poster