Directed by Sohan Roy. Starring Joshua Fredric Smith, Vinay, Vimala Raman, Megha Burman, Linda Arsenio, Ashish Vidyarthi, Rajit Kapoor.

A hodgepodge of a film, where the actual ‘dam’ gets about 10 minutes of screen time, this movie is about unfulfilled love, the pressures of life, astrology and Ayurveda.

One doesn’t expect a film like this to be good. So director Sohan Roy can be forgiven. People in Tamil Nadu can heave a sigh of relief that this film has been banned there for whatever political reason. They have been spared the torture. A film set in Kerala, where everyone speaks the Queen’s English and the songs are in Hindi, it needn’t have been in 3D. I saw it without the glasses for 90 per cent of the film without any compulsion to put them back on.

Dam 999’s cast is an eclectic mix of actors, Indian and foreign, who are reckoning with failed marriages, ex-flames and corrupt politicians. This is a land of snakebites and Ayurveda treatments. Rajit Kapoor’s character of the South Indian priest/healer dad to me is the strongest in the film. But his irritating obsession with astrology (the film even starts off with a bit about the stars influence on us) and refusal to let son Vinay (played by Vinay) get together with Meera (Vimala Raman) because grave things would happen if they did, is just plain silly.

Ashish Vidyarthi as the evil politician Durai fits the part well. But in the end it all looks too B-movie and cheesy to allow you to care for any of these characters. The dam bursting scene is clumsy and anti-climactic. One wishes the dam washed away the little kid in the film, whose line delivery is so stilted and puke-worthy that you wish he had died in the beginning of the movie (there is a set up for that).