Technically the movie gives you a unique style of cinematography, with interesting play of lights, but thats clearly not enough. Your interest starts waning after a point as you start losing track of whats happening as the director takes you too often on a giddy trip of different timelines. The movie is all style and very little soul. And thats a disappointment as it attempted to tell a really fascinating story of a mastermind. But do watch it, if only for Hooda.

Main Aur Charles is a film without songs although it has a remix of Jab chhaye mera jadoo koi bachh na paaye (Lootmaar, 1980) lip-synched by a cabaret performer in a Bombay nightclub – an indication of the period the film is set in.Another cinematic reference later in the film alludes to Fritz Lang’s expressionist Metropolis, which ‘movie lover’ Charles describes as “Hitler’s favourite film’. That is no mean detour for a Bollywood thriller.The supporting cast, which includes Tisca Chopra in the role of Amod Kanth’s wife and Vipin Sharma as a compromised jailor, do their bit for the drama. Bollywood biopics usually tend to be horrendously bloated and overwrought. Main Aur Charles is anything but.If that isn’t enough of an incentive, watch it for Randeep Hooda’s alluring French drawl and Adil Hussain’s sturdy presence.

it was the kind of astoundingly brazen kaand whose reverberations were felt in the system for a long time. Hussain tries hard, but is left to flounder: he fulminates too much, as opposed to the real-life Kanth who went after the real-life Sobhraj with the kind of dogged, smart approach that finally nailed the man. The reel representation is all jumbled surface, with very little going on underneath: What made this man tick? The film gives us no answers. Randeep Hooda has it. He needed a better film.

Not that we need it. Charles is the only ladykiller we know, and we remain fascinated. And despite the character having Mein Kampf on his shelf and showing fellow prisoners Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — “Hitler’s favourite film” — it should be remembered that the ‘Charles’ in his name came from a Chaplin impression he used to do back in the day. (Or, at least, that’s how the story goes.)

Prawaal Raman does a commendable job of recreating the 60s-70s. He also gets his protagonist’s physicality and smugness bang on. Working on a wafer-thin account given to him by the real-life Delhi cop, Amod Kanth, Raman still manages to infuse life (at least partly) into this film and into the life of the notorious killer.

The problem with Main Aur Charles is that it strives hard to be high on style but low on content. It constantly lets you down with the way the story is heading. If you feel like getting a whiff of the 80s and transcend into the hippie culture, you could watch the film but for more knowledge on Sobhraj, I suggest google is better.

There are many interesting strands in Main Aur Charles, but the strands dont weave together well because the thrills that give us a window into the cat-and-mouse-game between a determined cop and a rabid creep come at a staggered pace. In short, Main Aur Charles is a grim, no-frills cop and criminal saga, but we wish the thrills were as potent and magnetic as Sobhrajs notorious personality. Films complicated approach means viewers are left exhausted after playing catch-up with the storyline

In Prawaal Ramans fictional retelling of Charles Sobhrajs jailbreak in the mid-1980s, style trumps substance. Had Raman stuck with his investigation into Charless mystique and his self-mythologisation, this movie might have actually become the sophisticated biopic it wants to be. Main Aur Charles should really have been about the poster, not the case file.