After "Aashique 2 " Mohit Suri is counted amongst the top directors of Bollywood today and "Ek Villain" is his first movie outside Vishesh Films. Hence a lot of expectations were built before the release by Balaji's Marketing strategy and with good music to back it, this could have been a cake walk for Mohit .
"Ek Villain" is the Bollywood remake of the Korean movie "I Saw the Devil", Mohit with Tushar Hiranandani tries his best to put it in a Hindi Film formula. So it tells us the story of Guru (Sidharth Malhotra) who is the henchman of the local goon Ceaser (Remo Fernandes) who kills people for living but life changes for him when he meets Ayesha (Shradha Kapoor) and marries her but the happiness is short lived when a serial killer Rajesh (Riteish Deshmukh) plays havoc with their lives. How Guru copes up with the serial killer makes the rest of the story.
Written by Tushar Hiranandani the screenplay is bumpy and the problem is Tushar wanted to mix all genres in one film whether it was Romance or Thriller or Action and too many sub plots and inane characters in the sub plots weakens the main plot. The is no proper justification given as to why Rajesh becomes a serial killer, I felt some more work should have gone in making this character believable, it looks half baked. The biggest plus of the screenplay is, that it is fast. The dialogues by Milap Zaveri at times is good and at times it looks too dramatic for no rhyme and reason.
Mohit Suri's direction emphasizes too much into blood and gore. The confrontation sequences between the two main protagonists Guru and Rajesh looks interesting initially but later becomes repetitive. Mohit tries to put quite a few twists which makes the movie a bit interesting. But Mohit fails to keep the interest of the audience till the end which is important for a thriller.
It is the performances by the lead cast which lifts the movie especially the chemistry between Sidharth