Hate Story 3 Movie Review

Hate Story is a money making franchise of revenge-sex drama films which have found their audience in Bollywood and found a formula to make money on the back of sex, and good music. For the third part of the series, the makers have employed Sharman ‘Hirani’ Joshi, Karan Singh Grover from Tellywood and two Salman Khan heroines from his two rare failures in recent times. Does the formula continue and does the content get better with the third part of the series?

Story: Aditya Diwan (Sharman) marries Siya (Zarine) who was pregnant with the child of his dead elder brother. But Siya suffers a miscarriage. We are introduced to Saurabh Singhania (Karan, that reminds us how many Karans are there in the industry?!) who is a big business magnate. He offers Aditya a blank cheque to get to sleep with his wife for one night. The reason for this is revealed later on. We are also introduced to Kaya (Daisy) who is Aditya’s confidante. Thus beings a game of cat and mouse between the two men in which the women are played like pawns and used in the game of oneupmanship.

Screenplay and Direction: Hate Story 3 can be best described as the poor man’s Race movie with a smaller budget and lower grade actors. For all of its promise of sex, it seems as if most of the steamy scenes were already shown in the trailers and the movie is basically a skeleton of revenge twists and turns. The twists in Hate Story 3 are so bizarre that even Abbas Mastan would hide their faces on seeing the movie. There is no coherence, no respect for any semblances of any logic and the dialogues are just another level of cheesy. Why can’t these movies at least have relatable dialogues? Only thing that works in terms of direction is that it is never boring, as something always keeps happening on screen.

Hate Story 3 looks like a cheaply made film because the set designer and the costume designer don’t even try to hide the fact that they had to make do with a smallish budget. The editing is haphazard with some scenes ending seemingly at random.

Music: The music of a T-series is always expected to be good or at the very least, hummable. Sadly, Hate Story 3 fails in that benchmark too. The only song which makes a mark is the reimagining of “Tumhe Apna Banane Ka” by Amaal.

Acting: Hate Story 3 is a train wreck when it comes to the casting and acting reaches new depths. To make a film so reliant on the hotness of the actresses in it, surely more appealing women could have been cast? Ignoring that, neither Zarine nor Daisy are able to make any sort of impact in their roles. The expressions are forced and they are basically just reciting their memorized dialogues. Yes, it’s that bad. What is Sharman Joshi doing in a film like this? Why is he ruining his image of doing films like 3 Idiots, Ferrari Ki Sawaari and Rang De Basanti with this drivel? Karan Singh Grover tries his best because we can assume he saw this film as an audition for bigger and better films. He is good looking but lacks in the acting department.

Conclusion: Hate Story 3 is incoherent, doesn’t give the sexual amazement that it promised and the revenge plot is too twisted with bizarre logic. However, even with everything that it doesn’t get right, it gets one thing right. It is never boring. It keeps throwing plot points and twists at the audiences at a rapid pace which ends up keeping the audience occupied. That doesn’t mean the film is entertaining either.

Pros:

• It is never boring
• Karan Singh Grover is good
• Tumhe Apna Banane Ka song is hummable

Cons:

• The two lead actresses are jarring and unattractive
• Sharman Joshi is miscast
• The plot twists are plain and simple stupid
• The editing is random
• The costume design and production design is cheap
• The music disappoints

Rating: