Ludo Movie Review: A game which gets too tangled and never reaches its intended destination

Movie: Ludo (Hindi)

Cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Abhishek Bachchan, Aditya Roy Kapur, Rajkumar Rao, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Sanya Malhotra, Rohit Suresh Sarf, Pearle Maaney

Rating: 2.5/5

Ludo is an eccentric movie where four pair of different character's life overlaps in a game of chance called life. However, fate (the dice) has a different idea in its mind throughout

Five Positives and Negatives of the movie

We watched Ludo with a lot of expectations from all the rave reviews that we read online but it kind of left us disappointed. We have started believing that Netflix plants favorable reviews online. But let’s leave that discussion for another time.

Of course, we didn’t totally hate the movie and so we have listed down five high points and five low points of Ludo for us. 

5 positives-

1.      The story began with a very interesting premise introducing us to multiple storylines. Each of these storylines draws parallels to the game of Ludo that we have all grown up playing. It packs up a lot of promise for the rest of the film.

2.      The stories in the film explore various interesting takes on human emotions like love, greed, anger , and redemption. Like Akash-Shruti's story explores love and greed together while the Bittu and Mini's story explored his story of anger and redemption. Rahul and Sheeja's story explored ambitions and greed for this young couple and Alu and Pinky's story explored true love and betrayal.

3.      The cast boasts of a lot of talented actors. But  Pankaj Tripathi and Rajkumar Rao takes the cake. They are both hilarious and light up the film with their presence. The rest of the cast have all played their part well.

4.      The Music of the film is very catchy and keeps us hooked to the film. It maintains the pace of the film and doesn’t let it fizzle off.

5.      Kudos to the cinematography (by Anurag Basu himself) as well. Especially love the various shots used to introduce each of the characters. Throughout the film, a lot of interesting angles have been used to get us into each character’s story.

5 negatives- 

1.      The screenplay is quite flawed. The stories start off on a high getting us hooked but as they progress, they get tangled up and result in a mess. 

2.      The stories were not explored enough and thus lacked depth. Also, director Anurag Basu tries to over-explain things in the movie. He really dumbs down the audience. He should’ve allowed the audience to make their inferences. 

3.      The character development was not enough and thus we don’t really relate to most of the characters. There were too many characters which didn’t allow most of them enough screen time for us to understand them. Some of the character introductions were too hurried and so didn’t leave enough impact and were forgettable. 

4.      It was a poor attempt at dark comedy. There was a lot of forced humor throughout the movie. For example, the caricaturist police officer was only there to draw some laughs. A lot of scenes and dialogues were also put in a forced manner just to get laughs from the audience. 

5.      Let us not get started about the numerous illogical parts of the movie. Some characters would just not die to bring out metaphors to the game of Ludo while some characters are just killed off illogically without any consequences. You will understand what I’m talking about once you watch the movie.

 

Altogether the movie does get messy in the end but is quite a fun experience. Some of the actors carry the movie on their shoulders and make it an enjoyable watch. 

You can definitely check it out for Pankaj Tripathi and Rajkumar Rao and some interesting storylines. Don’t go in with a lot of expectations and you won’t be too disappointed.