Vodka Diaries Film Review – A Sordid Mess

Vodka Diaries is appalling. Not only does it fail to thrill the audiences but more disturbingly it makes a shabby mess of a psychological condition. Unfortunately, what we get is unintentional humor and Kay Kay Menon caught in the midst of some rather atrocious acting and directing. So, let’s review this film that takes a mental illness, namely, dissociative identity disorder and decides to play with it for some cheap thrills in the Vodka Diaries film review.

My grouse with Vodka Diaries is not that it fails to keep you engaged for its runtime. If that were so, there are plenty of cheap thrillers. What put me off was the way in which the filmmakers went about toying with a mental ailment that people have to grapple with in real life. If they had shown more sensitivity toward the subject, Vodka Diaries wouldn’t have come to fulfillment.

With a shoddy screenplay marring the first half of the movie, Kay Kay Menon is at sixes and sevens. The chemistry between him and Mandira Bedi is all over the place. The filmmakers couldn’t have gone for a worse onscreen couple if they had tried harder. What was the casting director thinking? And of the story, the lesser said, the better.

As I walked out of the theater, I heard a couple of men mumbling something to the effect that conveyed their incomprehensibility of the story. Now, this isn’t Inception and apparently not physics that has bounced over their heads. It is sheer bad writing that is so jumbled up that it lacks any sense of purpose for it to convey anything coherent to the audience. I don’t think those men were entirely off the mark in what they were thinking about the film.

You have a cop who is chasing a murderer who is behind a series of murders in a sleepy town. After a while, it is not precisely clear as to whether he imagines the crimes to have happened or there is something more than meets the eye. Sounds interesting? Trust me it is not. It is a whole lot of phony baloney.

As I walked out of the cinema hall, I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth were the filmmakers thinking when they set out to make Vodka Diaries. Surely with Kay Kay Menon in the lead role they could have done much better than what they achieved. If ever you think of seeing this movie, it is safe to say that it is best left alone.