'Kaabil' trailer a breathless blockbuster

Mumbai, Oct 26: Hrithik Roshan is not the only blind character in "Kaabil". The trailer reveals that his co-star Yami Gautam too is blind. And there is no attempt to hide the couple's world of darkness from us.

The first half of this sharply-divided, edgily-cut trailer shows the visually impaired couple meeting, falling in love, getting married, singing, dancing (even doing the Salsa) and then, the second half of the trailer lays out a dark, cruel world of tragedy and retribution for the blind hero Rohan Bhatnagar.

His wife is brutally violated and the law won't do a thing about it.

"Your world is even darker than mine," Hrithik tells the policemen with a wry, sinister smile that gave me goosebumps.

What will his revenge be, I wondered. Whatever the nature of the retribution against the villains (played by real-life brothers Ronit and Rahul Roy), one certainty stares us straight into our stunned faces in this trailer: this blind hero means business.

Without a shadow of doubt, Hrithik is a clear winner in every frame of the trailer, incidentally the best edited and packaged trailer I've seen this year.

That one moment when Yami's screams of pleasure on the rollercoaster merge into her screams of pain as she is tortured while Rohit pounds on the locked door, is worth its weight in gold.

Sanjay Gupta, take a bow.

Besides the consciously divided two halves giving us the before-and-after effect in the protagonist's life, the trailer is also remarkable for laying out the plot clearly on the table.

There is no attempt to hide that this is a vendetta tale of a blind man who is madly in love with the woman, whose violent death leaves him stunned with the knowledge that there is little justice in the world and that the less you are able to see of the physical world the more you are aware of how desperately short civilization is of humanism and compassion.

The trailer of "Kaabil" is a piece of pop art, gleaming with a glorious retributive fuel, sparkling with an implosive energy that flows out Hrithik and saturates every frame.

Yup, this Republic Day belongs to Hrithik Roshan and "Kaabil". And if I was Shah Rukh Khan, I would take my film to another Friday. Any other Friday. But not this one.

Incidentally, this is the third time after "Badlapur" and "Action Jackson" that Yami Gautam plays the hero's beloved wife who is killed brutally and lingers as a memory.