I couldn't help thinking that this is Vishal Bharadwaj's take on- perhaps, even tribute to- Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
He is arguably India's finest director- but Kaminey isn't his finest work.
In his earlier films, Maqbool and Omkara (both brilliant adaptations of Shakespeare's tragedies, Hamlet and Othello) Mr. Bharadwaj didn't just tell tales; he gave us entire visions of worlds- or more precisely, underworlds- complete in themselves, populated with their own distinctive vocabularies. Like Chopin's piano concertos, we could feel cannons pounding away under a bed of roses.
In Kaminey, however, Mr. Bharadwaj tends to get carried away: one might even say, he tends to become over-indulgent. The same scene is approached from several angles, the long- shots get a bit too long, and the music crowds out Gulzar's deeply-felt lyrics: put simply, the filmmaker's craft- its obsession with technical wizardry- becomes, at times, a burden on the film itself.
Unlike his previous films, inhabited by characters who were neither all good nor all bad but lived precariously in a moral twilight zone, this one has heroes, heroines and a bunch of comically bizarre villains. They all seem, to me, to lack depth.
Priyanka Chopra is wonderful, her role possibly award-winning, and Shahid Kapoor, in a double role, is, well, passionate. There is much he has to learn from his father, Pankaj Kapoor, who starred in Maqbool.
For instance, not all things have to be said or shown on screen; the best scenes are when things are simply felt. The same holds true for Kaminey.
For feeling is precisely what is missing in this otherwise brilliant filmmaker's film.