Setters

Close on the heels of Why Cheat India comes another movie set around the education mafia. And just like the Emraan Hashmi starrer, it's not very good. Director Ashwini Chaudhary's Setters adopts a heist thriller's tone to depict the practice of paid proxies and leaked question papers facilitated by a scamming service in Varanasi whose network extends all across India as Apurva (Shreyas Talpade), right hand man to the ill-tempered creep (Pavan Malhotra) running the business, travels between Mumbai and Delhi to get the job done.

"Kaahe labadh-labadh kar raha hai?" sounds so much more colourful than its English translations "Why are you blabbering?" or "Why are you talking rubbish?" Siraj Ahmed's Hindi dialogues, rooted in the soil of Varanasi, are among the nicer elements in Setters, a film set in the holy city amidst an unholy bunch of locals running an exam paper leaking racket. Their trade is far more sophisticated than you might imagine, and gets increasingly high-tech with each passing day as the police close in on the gang.

Apurva is the henchman of bhaiyyaji (Pavan Malhotra), a megalomaniacal thug of Varanasi, who harbours political ambitions. In order to nab the 'setters', who are always one step ahead, Aditya hires a team of errant suspended police officers who he thinks can outsmart Apurva and his team. Who wins?

Setters is about the same thing, more or less, but it doesn't bother with bringing up any of these tricky moral ambiguities. It is very clear about good and bad, black and white, and bungs in, for good measure, a cruel mastermind who gets his jollies from snapping off human fingers.

Welcome to the murky world of academic fixers. If you are not an Indian and reading this, then let me quickly tell you North India has a tradition of proxy examinees. Bright doppelgangers who fill in for not so-bright examinees at examinations, answer their papers and go home with some tidy money.

Two actors whose Bollywood careers have gone off the boil a tad - Shreyas Talpade and Aftab Shivdasani - make a fair fist of anchoring Ashwini Chaudhary's uneven crime drama Setters. In a film that yo-yos between the mildly interesting and the drably monotonous, they esay the roles of two Varanasi college mates whose lives have gone in diametrically opposite directions - one is an upright IPS officer, the other a conman who is part of a nationwide examination racket.