Deepanjana Pal
Within five minutes of Mumbaikar, you may find yourself wondering if you’ve been put in a time machine. Not that Hindi cinema in 2023 is particularly evolved, but Mumbaikar feels like it belongs in a video cassette library from the late Nineties.
More importantly, surely the claim that Mumbaikar is directed by Santosh Sivan (also credited as the film’s cinematographer) is an April Fool’s joke? The man who made Halo (1996) and Asoka (2001); who has been the cinematographer on films as beautiful as Vanaprastham (1999) and Raavanan (2010)
There are no redeeming features to the juddering logjam of awfulness that is Mumbaikar. Himanshu Singh’s screenplay has picked up nothing from the long list of films and streaming shows that have attempted to put together portraits of Mumbai.
Sivan also films the city unimaginatively, making Mumbai look like a collection of cheap sets from a television serial and a few characterless exterior shots of a generic city.
The best one can hope for a film like Mumbaikar is that it will be forgotten. It’s difficult to see why anyone would want to put their name to such a project and why a platform would want something like Mumbaikar in its stable, especially at the time of its launch.