Director - Pooja Bhatt
Starring - John Abraham, Udita Goswami (Introducing), Mohan Agashe, Master. Madan, Gulshan Grover, Anahita Uberoi, Denzil Smith, Anupam Shyam
Music - Anu Malik, Shahi, Ali Azmat

After sitting through Paap, this reviewer must report that it is indeed prime paap (sin) to expend one's precious time and money on Pooja Bhatt’s directorial debut.

The main emotions the tale evokes within one with are wonder and awe. Wonder at the talented lama tailors up in the Spiti Monastery where our heroine resides -- those dudes can give Mizrahi and McCartney a run for their money, and awe at John’s and Udita’s acting skills or lack there-of.

The tale is supposed to delve into the innermost thoughts of Kaya (wooden but pretty model-turned-actress Udita Goswami) and her emotional strife as she struggles with spirituality versus the simpler pleasures of human desire. Kaya is your average sexually repressed Bollywood heroine -- you know the kind that suffers from regular onslaughts of erotic dreams.

Living among stone faced Lamas and a few stray goats, she lets her imagination go totally wild while swimming underwater in her virginal ‘fruit of the loom’ undies and singing songs of longing and pash embraces.

Her uptight dad (Mohan Agashe) has already etched out a path of spirituality for her and blanches at her blatant ‘come hither’ poems. When the Rimpoche (local big shot Llama) gets a vision about his master's reincarnation in New Delhi in the form of a six-year-old boy, Kaya is sent out to bring the boy to the monastery.

Ours is not to question why Kaya of all people is selected for the mission, or what is it about the boy’s background that makes him the chosen one. All that is incidental as the hero Shiven (hunky John Abraham) is introduced. Abraham is immensely pleasing to the eye but has miles yet to go in the acting department. He wets his hair and chest and squints sexily into the camera often, doing scant else through out the film.

When the young, reincarnated Rimpoche accidentally witnesses a murder committed in the airport restroom, police officer Shiven has to protect the little boy and his beautiful guardian from the baddies who seek to rub out the young witness to their dastardly deed.

The baddies chase the good folks, and so on, blah blah blah, and in the process, our hero takes a bullet in his shoulder. Despite being shot, in pain and suffering from terrible hallucinations, he drives his wards to the monastery and collapses in exhaustion, pain and incipient feelings of lust.

Kaya and the resident Lama docs set about fixing him up. Kaya in the meantime continues to have pretty hot dreams. Now her lover has a name and a face. We are subjected to repeated scenes of Shiven, simulating deep passion, nibbling and chewing on Kaya’s neck, ears and cheeks. Kaya pants at regular intervals to display her ecstasy at being nibbled. So adept is Kaya at rhythmic, heavy breathing that she clearly has a bright future as a Lamaze instructor, in case this acting thing does not work out.

Shiven and Kaya continue to pant and sigh around each other but the latter still needs to come to terms with the fact that she wants Shiven more than Nirvana. This spiritual turmoil continues until the baddies inevitably find their way to the monastery. After a brief lecture about the good, the bad and the ugly, our hero tackles the world’s issues and rides away into the sunset with the hickey covered Kaaya.

A loose remake of Peter Weir's Witness (1985), Paap is a laughable attempt at filmmaking. The saving grace are the music and the music videos. The songs are excellent with Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Ali Azmat (of Junoon) lending their best to this mediocre cinematic fare.

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