Kolkata becomes the fascinating, aptly antiquated backdrop after Sujoy Ghosh's 2012 released thriller Kahaani. With an interesting cast and based on the Korean film “Montage,”  Ribhu Dasgupta's TE3N creates lots of hope among the cinema goers. Here is our review.

Story : An eight-year-old girl is kidnapped and the police are clueless, because what looks like an ordinary crime turns out to be a meticulously planned abduction. It leaves the child’s justice-seeking grandfather John Biswas (Bachchan) in lurch, but he won’t accept defeat without a fight. He begins to probe into the matter but a police officer Sarita (Vidya Balan) and a pastor Martin Das (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) can make his task easy.

What's Hot : "TE3N" sucks you into its little universe of determination, tenacity and duplicity. Astutely created and Indianized (we have not viewed the first), it keeps the viewer tempted by its progressive addition of over a significant time span, and a planned flip-flop between the two separate investigations, with John not a part of what the cops are taking after and the other way around. The conclusion is layered however extremely persuading.

What's Not : However sometimes it missed opportunities. Because there are rousing actors in here, and there’s a real city to play it all out in. Kolkata is a perfect location for a film like this with its atmospheric patches and the iconic Howrah-Hooghly 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.

The plot has an excessive amount of fluff, and the characters are all surface : Bachchan's sagging facial lines, Balan's stolid-cop-stepping—these carefully attracted diagrams point out themselves, yet don't manage the cost of us internal subtle elements.

Performances : A towering performance by Bachchan tops the film’s distinctions. He is so credibly weak, helpless, frail and yet determined, patient and resourceful in his own way. His eyes speak enough to convey his emotions, and his body language goes even beyond the 100 percent felt by them. This is Bachchan as he should be in his age and stature: “TE3N” is that able successor to his National Award-winning “Piku” that “Wazir” could not be at all.