I suppose you know by now which D O U B L E S P A C E D movie I'm talking about. If you don't, it's really not your fault. I was pretty confused when I watched it too. But the film I'm about to review is called Ghajini. (The Hindi one - just making sure we're on the same page!)

So let's get the riff raff out first. This is a point in Jiah Khan's life when she most certainly needs to look for another career option. Acting, as is obvious, is not her cup of tea, at least not in Hindi cinema. (Yes Jiah, we know you detest movies that involve you dancing around trees, but you could at least try speaking in Hindi!)

Asin; new to Hindi cinema too, but slightly more promising than Jiah Khan. So, when Director A. R. Murugadoss tells her about her character, she goes home and studiously watches Amelie 12 times to try and get the character right. Keep going Asin, we're sure you'll get there someday! But like I said, she's better than Jiah, although that's not saying much.

Pradeep Rawat, who plays Ghajini, brings back memories of 80’s and early 90’s Hindi films where the villain wore copious amounts of gold jewellery and had no real reason to be the villain. While this may be a very good thing for a movie like Main Hoon Na or Om Shanit Om, which do not claim to be serious cinematic experiences, in Ghajini, this is one of the first things that let’s us down. Although, it must be said that Rawat wasn’t exactly bad at what he was asked to do.

Aamir Khan. We’ve all known him to be the ‘perfectionist’ and ‘the thinking actor’. But these oft used titles don’t quite fit with this film. And that, by no means, is a comment on his acting skills. Because yours truly has also put himself through the Tamil version of the movie that was made about two years ago, and Aamir certainly lifts this one a few notches. All in all, Aamir is, well, mind-blowing in this flick.

Let us now come to the one man that can make or break a movie, the director. Unfortunately, in this case, he’s only helped break the movie, in irreparable ways. And the reason for this seems to be a lack of vision in A. R. Murugadoss’s mind. One gets the feeling that he watched Memento and wanted, as soon as he could, to make his own rendition of it. Turns out he didn’t quite think things through before going on the floor with Ghajini. If we just took the movie piece by piece, we’d know why.

To begin with, things have been oversimplified and spelt out in this film. And in spite of the fact that many would go as far as to call this a suspense thriller, we already know who Sanjay Singhania (Aamir) is after. So, that’s that for the suspense quotient of this film.

Also, I just logged no to the internet to do a little research on Aterograde Amnesia (that’s what Singhania suffers from) and found that there is absolutely no way in which the patient’s memory span can be clearly defined. So, instead of ‘he can only remember things for F-I-F-T-E-E-N minutes’, it could just be ‘he can’t remember things for very long’. That doesn’t take too much, does it? Moreover, ambiguity is the one premise that every good suspense thriller rests on, no?

To come to Aamir’s eight-pack-abs. Good job, sir. But why exactly? I should very much like to know why someone needs to go and build that kind of a hulky frame when all it needs to blow heads off is a gun! Even if we leave out this humble blogger’s personal opinion out, what exactly is the reason for those abs, apart from making great promotional news, of course?

Let us now relate my views to what actually happens in the movie. Singhania, after having his brains blown out, becomes this all-out psychotic man, who cannot remember things for too long. So he starts getting things tattooed on his body. He gets by with a little help from a Polaroid camera. All understandable so far. And then there’s Murugadoss’s touch. Singhania starts scribbling violent graffiti on the same wall. Just a little something to think about here. Already he can’t remember things, and to add to that, there’s random scribblings on a wall that’s supposed to let him know the people whose pictures it holds. I’m quite as much as confused as Singhania should have been.

Now, finally, the biggest problem with this film. The absolute lack of sensitivity. One can understand that Singhania’s only means to cool himself off is to kill Ghajini and keep a photograph of the event. However, there is not a frame where he thinks about Kalpana (Asin) and feels sad about what happened. Murugadoss seems to have discounted the fact that the biggest reason for anger is sadness. And although, it’s fair for Singhania to not feel guilty about killing a few dozen unrelated people, he is not once shown thinking about it, not even within fifteen minutes of realizing it.

All in all, Ghajini is not particularly a good movie, or even a highly entertaining one.