Rashtra Kavach Om is BORING, Deepa Gahlot yawns.

There was an immediate red flag when a suburban movie theater decided to cancel a showing of Rashtra Kavach Om because they needed at least eight people, and there were only four.

All those commercials about the lead actor building his body to play a soldier, the lead actress training hard for the battle sequences, and the audience couldn’t be bothered to show up!

Have they overdosed on patriotism in movies and web shows?

Do they expect the level of action seen in recent regional language films and the dubbed versions of Hollywood superhero movies and nothing less will suffice?

Whatever the reason, if more people bought tickets to see this film they would only have been disappointed or worse, upset.

Rashtra Kavach Om is a throwback to those films made in the past, when actors worked multiple shifts a day and didn’t have time to change their costumes or vary their lines.

Scenes and dialogue were written based on which actor showed up for the shoot and how much time the hero had.

Even then, in the end, the film made sense.

What excuse does director Kapil Verma have for making such a slapdash film?

And how did the writers (Raj Saluja-Niket Pandey) get away with this script?

Production houses and actors talk about working with hardback scripts, but does anyone actually read them?

The only ones who seem to have done their jobs are the action director and Aditya Roy Kapur’s trainer.

He plays Om, who is part of a top-notch team of R&AW agents in search of a priceless gizmo – the kavach — protecting the target of a nuclear attack.

Considering the man who developed the shield (Jackie Shroff) was kidnapped 20 years ago, that doesn’t say much about the country’s unsuspecting intelligence network, let alone Jai Hind or Jai Bhavani Slogans the patriots chant all the time.

Then Om loses his memory for no reason and after some time maa ka haath ki kheer emotional drama, he happens to get it back.

There are several flashback missions of what happened to Om in childhood who are his parents (Ashutosh Rana-Prachee Shah Paandya) and hardly anything fits together.

A team member who died in one part of the world reappears in another with no explanation.

A boss is yelling at everyone in sight, but there’s the big fat R&AW mole in sight.

After a truly dangerous mission, the team head off to dance at a nightclub with the “item number” ticked off a random list of must-have sequences.

Prakash Raj is in the film, perhaps because they wanted a Southern star, and Sanjana Sanghi was cast to portray a love interest – a very tepid romance at that.

Luckily there is no dream sequence involved dupatta Flutter in slow motion.

The slow motions are reserved for the heroes’ boasting, the melee combat they find time for despite being armed to the teeth, because flying and crashing baddies look better than dropping dead.

However, Om’s shirt-ripping scene has no effect, and his chain-pulling helicopter will only yawn.

A bad film can save something if it’s entertaining; Rashtra Kavach Om is criminally boring.

Rediff Rating: