Critics’ Verdict: ‘Raaz Reboot’ Is Unintentionally Funny

Hilarious, yes. Horror? No! Critics are putting their money - and hope - on it being the last in the franchise.

Film: Raaz Reboot
Director: Vikram Bhatt
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Gaurav Arora, Kriti Kharbanda

Here are excerpts from what film critics have to say about Raaz Reboot.

The list of movies that have been commissioned so that audiences can watch Hashmi’s lips in action is long and increasingly inexplicable. Why build a 127-minute narrative around false hopes, non-existent sexual frisson, non-scary horror scenes, songs that escape memory, and a plot that relies on the power of the mangal sutra to set things right? Even the Ramsay brothers are more fun than this toothless romp in vampire country.

Nandini Ramnath (Scroll)

Nothing changes in the fourth of the Raaz franchisee. If at all the chills and thrills seem to run dangerously out of steam and some scenes turn out unintentionally funny. Like when Kriti Kharbanda, sprawled naked on the dining table, says huskily, with fake intensity, that she is feeling hot, “so ******* hot” (in minus ten degrees) the whole theatre tittered in unison. I laughed again when she recited Tagore in faux Bengali: “What strange path led you to me.”  

Namrata Joshi (The Hindu)

In a fine statement on inclusive secularism, the characters employ Christian exorcism, Hindu sacred text, clairvoyant, tarot-card reader, and one “psychometry” specialist to get rid of the ghost, encompassing alongside a whole bunch of bread-and-butter horror pictures you may have seen in the past. Most of them quite often owe their origins to the good old, unholy trinity: Omen, Exorcist and Poltergeist series.This one, of course, is the fourth installment of Raaz. It’s called Reboot, I’m told, because of some copyright issues.  

Mayank Shekhar (Mid-Day)

...Instead, you shake with laughter that is entirely unintended. Because Rahaan (Gaurav Arora) and his pretty wife Shaina (Kriti Kharbanda), and a shadowy blast from her past Aditya (Emraan Hashmi) spend all their time talking thusly: ‘kuch toh raaz hai’, ‘kya raaz hai’, ‘kahin toh raaz chhupa hai’, ‘yeh raaz hamein alag kar dega’, over and anon, till this purported ‘raaz’ starts coming out of our ears, but refuses to come in front of our eyes.

Shubhra Gupta (Indian Express)