Time to Dance

There are times when you wonder whether tolerance is a quality or a curse. If you can finish watching Sooraj Pancholi and Isabelle Kaif starrer Time to Dance without any sort of fast-forwarding, you will reach that point I mentioned in the beginning. This underdog dance story is so bad that you will wonder which element in this story made them believe that there is potential in this film. At one point, I was expecting the film to reach the “so bad that it’s good” zone, but even that didn’t happen.

Rishabh is a street dancer who works in a posh restaurant. And his restaurant happens to be the venue of an annual ballroom dancing competition. During the announcement of the competition, Rishabh happens to see Isha, who was the dancing partner of the reigning champion William. Unfortunately, an accident happens to Isha, causing injury to her ligament, and William decides to opt for a new partner. Isha’s efforts to beat William in the competition and how Rishabh comes to her help are what we see in the movie.

Well, the entire plot of the movie is there in the trailer itself. It’s like Remo D’Souza’s ABCD series. You are going in with no expectations about having a fresh story. But in the case of ABCD, there are at least dance bits that would make you happy. Here that aspect is also pathetic. In most of the scenes, the editor is trying to fool the audience into believing that our lead pair delivers some great dance moves by simply cutting into reaction shots of the audience. At one point, we could see Rajpal Yadav and Waluscha De Sousa clapping with excitement, and the editor has forgotten to show the lead pair before that shot.

Sooraj Pancholi seems to be a firm believer of the Salman Khan school of acting, showing a stubborn attitude on your face and considering it as intense acting. His struggle with the expressions reaches a hilarious high in the scene where he tells Isha about his past relationship. Isabelle Kaif, the sister of Katrina Kaif, would remind you of Katrina in her initial days. The expressions are limited, but the movie isn’t bothered about that at all as it only focuses on her looks. Rajpal Yadav is trying hard to create some slang humor, but calling his efforts terrible would be an understatement. Waluscha De Sousa gets a pointless role in the movie.

This film is Remo D’Souza’s long-time associate Stanley D’Costa’s first film as a director, and Deepak Dwivedi does the writing for the movie. From a writing point of view, Time to Dance is what you get when you don’t bother developing the structure of a story you have in your mind. It’s just cliche after cliche in every scene, and one can even see the 80s and 90s level cheesy hero sacrifice ideas in this movie. And the most bizarre part of the writing was the English dialogues. Dwivedi basically wrote a script for some Hindi daily soap, pasted the Hindi dialogues on google translator, and made the English actors say those lines. The cinematography just wants to make the frames look shiny, and the editing is simply bizarre. One could see the exact same shot getting repeated at a totally irrelevant place.

After watching the trailer, I wasn’t having high hopes about the content. But since the director was a choreographer, I was hoping to see some solid dance moves. But it seems like the actors couldn’t deliver that too in a convincing way. So, on the whole, Time to Dance doesn’t deserve your time.

By Aswin Bharadwaj

Founder and editor of Lensmen Reviews.

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