With ‘Te3n’, the Director takes us back into the lanes of Kolkata, the city of Joy after the much lauded ‘Kahaani’ and ‘Piku’, which too found their story settings in the same city. The thriller has a slow first half but post-interval it starts to pick up with its pace, only to again crawl towards the end. And when you have three of industry's best talent in a film, the expectation levels are bound to go soaring high. They are true pillars of the movie which save you from yawning. Unfortunately, in the director’s story-telling, the oscillation between the flash back and the present are quite blurry and may even leave the viewers slightly confused. This is a sign that the screenplay needed a better working upon. Also, the movie is too predictable, and you keep expecting something that would surprise you. But alas, it fails to engage you till the last. In 2 hours and 16 min, the film seems too stretched till perpetuity. Amitabh Bachchan as the grieving grandfather leaves you choked with emotions. Be it showing pain, helplessness or angst, the 'Shahenshah' delivers a commendable and smooth act that stays with you for a long time. you must watch this movie for Amitabh Bachchan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Vidya Balan's performances which breathe life in this film.

A grieving grandfather, a crumbling city and a sarcastic cop-turned-priest: Director Ribhu Dasgupta’s TE3N is the sum of this riveting combination, made more powerful by one of Amitabh Bachchan’s finest performances. An eight-year-old girl is kidnapped and the police are clueless, because what looks like an ordinary crime turns out to be a meticulously planned abduction. Based on the Korean thriller Montage, TE3N is like a Hitchcock film where you keep staring at the screen in anticipation of a new twist even though you have a vague idea about the end. It’s edgy, gripping and dark, mostly because of the actors and partly due to the milieu. While Nawazuddin brings a strangeness to the table, Sabyasachi shows how to get noticed subtly. Amitabh is the cohesive force behind this thriller. The director weaves a web of lies and psychological disorders, but he also attaches motives to his characters. Though his choice of background music surprises at times, he compensates with pace. His biggest success is the high degree of audience involvement in a 138-minute film. TE3N catches you by the neck and keeps you engrossed till the end credits. Amitabh’s superlative form is just one of the incentives to watch it. TE3N has enough to make you like it.

The strength of TE3N lies in its performances. The weakest part is the writing. The story begins well, but soon you lose track of what is happening because there's so much happening. Or nothing happening. The ebb and flow of important events in TE3N is not handled well. Also, it doesn't help that the viewer can crack the biggest twist in the tale way before the filmmaker reveals it. It is disappointing considering what the film could have been, had the major issues been paid a bit more attention to. At 2 hours 16 minutes, the film seems to stretch on till eternity. TE3N suffers from sloppy editing, but more than compensates for it in the cinematography. Through Tushar Kanti Ray's lens, Kolkata is a city struggling to stay standing. The old-age charm of the City of Joy is captured in all its glory. It hides its secrets well, be it in the crumbling walls of the buildings or the idol immersion at the Nimtala Ghat. The chiaroscuro of the by-lanes of Kolkata make you oddly nostalgic. TE3N, however, is no Kahaani. It is at best a hotchpotch of a film that could have been so much better. Watch it though. For the brilliant acting.

The script harnesses a slew of props – a rickety scooter that acts up every now and then, an old audiotape, a black van that spells danger, a cap-less pen that holds a secret, canvas duffle bags, army camouflage uniform and a hood under which the kidnapper hides – to build up suspense. Te3n hinges on a missing schoolgirl and a distraught grandfather’s nearly decade-long fight for justice. An official but considerably tweaked remake of the 2013 Korean thriller Montage, the film opens eight years after the tragic incident. Te3n is by no means a visceral thrill-a-minute crime drama, but its red herrings are sufficiently intriguing. They keep the viewer second-guessing its twists and turns. Te3n is studded with stellar performances. Amitabh Bachchan, who eschews much of his mannerisms, inhabits the character of the ageing man fighting against all odds to redeem himself – in his own eyes. Vidya Balan, whose presence in the cast is rather mystifyingly billed as a special appearance, has a full-fledged role. Of course, the film is none the worse for it. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, on his part, is called upon to flesh out two distinct personas. He does so with remarkably subtle variations in body language and dialogue delivery. It isn’t an edge-of-the-seat humdinger. The motivations of its key characters are at times rather fuzzy. And it suffers from a pronounced Kahaani hangover (which is not surprising given that director Sujoy Ghosh is the producer). But Te3n is never less than eminently watchable. The slow-burning drama about crime, tragedy, guilt and retribution has the potential to repay the patience of those that don’t switch off their brains when watching a film.

Age -- and, indeed, time -- are important parts of director Ribhu Dasgupta's narrative in his confoundingly titled thriller, and Bachchan is the ideal choice for the part of an inconsolable grandfather, doggedly desperate to find out about a long-ago kidnapping that led to his granddaughter's death. He's terrific in the part, evocative and righteous and overreaching for the truth but alas, Dasgupta seems too smitten with Bachchan to get a move on and tell the story. A remake of the Korean thriller Montage, Te3n unfolds its dramatic plot -- too sluggishly -- but this isn't too bad until we hit the climax, after which the film's makers are too obsessed with Bachchan (and his reactions to the climax, and its twist) to let the story work. One of the most exasperating things about Hindi movies are their over-reliance on flashbacks, their need to spoon-feed audiences by reminding them of something they saw 10 minutes ago, and the last half-hour of Te3n goes on interminably, recapping the entire film as if to show us how clever they've been. Tragically, however, they haven't been clever at all. It's difficult not to predict the film's twist, and -- the fundamental problem in films that hinge too critically on that massive twist -- when that doesn't fall into place, the whole house of cards collapses to the ground. TE3N feels like it was put together by people who didn't know where things should go. Amitabh Bachchan is excellent, no question. Ah, if only his mystery involved an elusive bottle of Isabgol.

Remember that reasonably engrossing Hollywood thriller Se7en, in which two sleuths go looking for a serial killer with a thing for the seven deadly sins? TE3N gimmicks its name similarly and gives us three characters in search of a criminal, but it doesn’t borrow any of the smarts from the Hollywood film. This official remake of a Korean mystery with a kidnapping and a death at its heart is a sluggish drag for the most part, brightened only occasionally by a scene or a line. TE3N is a case of sadly missed opportunities. Because there are rousing actors in here, and there’s a real city to play it all out in. Kolkata is a perfect location for a film like this with its atmospheric patches and the iconic Howrah-Hoogly vistas, reminding you of producer Sujoy Ghosh’s far more engaging ‘Kahaani’, but how a man clad in a dark hoody ( in sultry Kolkata) manages to move around those streets so freely remains an unsolvable mystery. Its treatment does both place and characters in, turning everything lackadaisical. In its attempt to be less ‘dark’, loud background music is added in at each step. The plot has too much fuzz, and while the identity of the culprit does come as a surprise if you haven’t been attentive to some amount of obviousness in the unravelling, the suspense is not as killing as it can be, which for a whodunit like this, is the real crime.

John Biswas' (Bachchan) life is torn apart when his young granddaughter Angela Roy is kidnapped. Though Martin (Nawazuddin), the police inspector who handled the case has quit; John refuses to do so. Eight years after her disappearance, a similar kidnapping puts the spotlight back on the case. John, Martin and a new Inspector Sarita Sarkar (Vidya Balan) begin their hunt for the criminal. What is intriguing is that the modus operandi seems to be similar to the Angela case. Based on the Korean film, Montage, Te3n is a whodunnit that is simple in its intention but clever in its execution. The disappearance of an abducted child has turned two people's lives upside down; one is that of John and the second is that of Martin (Nawaz, who is flawless as a policeman-turned-padri seeking atonement). The plot starts with introducing the audience to the eight-year-old kidnapping case through a conversation between John and investigating officer Sarita (Vidya is dynamic). And its strength is that it never wavers from around its three principal characters - the granddad, cop and priest, each of who is involved with the case for reasons of their own. What is also impressive is that the mystery is kept alive right through. As the jigsaw puzzle falls into place, the protagonists' feelings towards the situation and themselves falls perfectly into place, keeping the viewers pleasantly engaged with the plot and the people. The film's ability to maintain the suspense right till the end makes it a must-watch for those who like whodunnits. However, a better pace could have lifted this film a notch higher.