Only Nawaz’s guilt-ridden priest breaks free once in a way, and a few red herrings infuse some intrigue, especially towards the end.Īnd while the identity of the culprit does come as a surprise if you haven’t been attentive to some amount of obviousness in the unravelling, the suspense is not as killing as it can be, which for a whodunit like this, is the real crime. Teen is a mystery thriller film in which Amitabh Bachchan is desperate to find the kidnapper and murderer of his granddaughter Angela who died 8 years ago.T. Why is her full-fledged act termed a guest appearance? That mystery too stays unsolved. The plot has too much fuzz, and the characters are all surface : Bachchan’s droopy facial lines, Balan’s stolid-cop-stomping-these painstakingly drawn outlines call attention to themselves, but do not afford us inner details. In its attempt to be less ‘dark’, loud background music is added in at each step. Its treatment does both place and characters in, turning everything lackadaisical. Kolkata is a perfect location for a film like this with its atmospheric patches and the iconic Howrah-Hoogly vistas, reminding you of producer Sujoy Ghosh’s far more engaging ‘Kahaani’, but how a man clad in a dark hoody ( in sultry Kolkata) manages to move around those streets so freely remains an unsolvable mystery.

Because there are rousing actors in here, and there’s a real city to play it all out in. TE3N is a case of sadly missed opportunities.

Te3n 2016