KARAM. Director: Sanjay F Gupta India 2004 117 mins (15) Music: Vishal-Shekhar, Pankaj Awasthi, Amit Mishram, John Abraham, Priyanka Chopra, Shiny Ahuja, Bharat Dhabolkar, Murali Sharma Do accomplished cinematographers make excellent story tellers? Can they narrate a story with flourish?

Well, they do deliver sometimes (Santos Sivan, The Terrorist). But, at others, they miss the target.

When a cinematographer narrates a tale, be assured of picture perfect frames.

But there's more to a film than astounding visuals. Sanjay F Gupta's directorial debut Karam suffers on these grounds. The film has a hackneyed plot (screenplay: Suparn Verma) and though Gupta compensates it with style and panache, the film lacks the power to keep you hooked as it unfolds.

John (Abraham) is an assassin who works for mob boss Captain (Dabholkar).

One fateful day, John ends up massacring an entire family. As he stares into the eyes of the little girl, whose life is slowly ebbing away, realization hits John and he decides to quit and start life afresh, sans bloodshed, with his wife Shalini (Chopra).

Captain is facing a major threat from a rival don Yunus (Pradhan) and after an attack on his life, he decides to retaliate. Captain wants to kill the city's top industrialist, top film producer, the cop backing Yunus and lastly, Yunus himself. His strategy: Set a precedent so that everyone else toes the line and no one dreams of becoming another Yunus.

But to execute this plan, Captain needs the help of his ace assassin - John. One man who can make this audacious plan work, but he is one man who has sworn never to pick up his gun again.

Gangsters and the underworld rivalries are subjects that have been tackled a zillion times in Bollywood. For any high-octane thriller to leave a mark, it ought to be embellished with nail-biting moments, but that razor sharp impact is clearly missing in Karam. + Two flaws of the film are the way the film has been shot and its slow narrative. In fact, you constantly feel that Gupta has made a Hollywood-ish film in the garb of a Hindi film. One wonders why the director has gone overboard in filming the scenes in sepia and tint effects.

Director Sanjay F Gupta has mounted the film well, but the film will be remembered more as a stylish fare than a gripping fare. On the whole, Karam is all gloss, no substance. At the boxoffice, its rejection is foreseeable.