I am so ashamed I am writing this review. Curiosity killed me. Or, rather, curiosity killed my 150 rupees. I was curious about what Bond girl Caterina Murino (Solange in 2006's Casino Royale) was doing in a Bollywood film. That was why I went to see Fever. Also, the film looked sleek, what with all those gorgeous Swiss locales and all. I was deceived quite easily. I ended up sleeping through a nice part of the film before the interval. The film hardly made any sense in the first 30 minutes. This, together with the air conditioning in the multiplex, made me sleep. A loud noise just before the interval woke me up. I realised it was a very badly composed background score. For once it is hard to believe that the background score has been composed by Ranjit Barot! But that is how bad Fever is. Except those Swiss locales and some beautiful photography nothing else is good in Fever. But why am I praising the cinematography? The camera-work is good, but, in the end, everything is just like some beautiful picture postcard from Europe. In fact, when a range of logos of European travel firms and Swiss government organisations is displayed right after the censor board certificate and the no smoking ad, you know what is in store: A Bollywood-style promo of Swiss tourism. Caterina Murino has a you-blink-and-you-miss-her role, but the most heartbreaking thing about Fever is Victor Banerjee's role. The veteran actor has only a short and absolutely unimportant cameo. It looked like they needed just a star or a big-name actor to do that cameo➖hence, Victor Banerjee. And better to say nothing about Rajeev Khandelwal, Gauhar Khan, Gemma Atkinson, and debutante Ankita Makwana. I read somewhere that Gemma Atkinson is a big star of British television. What kind of fever compelled her to act in this Fever? Seriously, Fever is just a 127-minute-long, made-by-Bollywood commercial for Swiss tourism featuring six big and small celebrities from India and abroad. I have given Fever 2 stars out of 10. One star is for the guts of the makers of this film who believed that they could get away with making such a joke of a film. The second star is for making me fall asleep, for the first time in my life, in a cinema hall! Yet, Fever is still far better than another film I saw on this fiction/reality theme: the Arjun Rampal-Jacqueline Fernandez-Ranbir Kapoor-starrer, Roy. I could still sit - even sleep - through Fever. In Roy, I just walked out in the interval and did not return for the rest of the film➖the film was so unbearable!
