Family ties, family sighs, family screams. This is a film that promises plenty of punches and delivers quite a few, though not necessarily as and when you'd expect them.

While certainly not among Rajkumar Santoshi's best (namely "Ghayal", "Ghatak", "Damini" and "Lajja"), "Family" comes up with a slyly scripted actioner (by Shridhar Raghavan/Rajkumar Santoshi) that turns the tables on the crime perpetrators of the world.

What if the world's biggest gangster - and you know how big he gets if he's played by the Amitabh Bachchan - suddenly finds his match in a common man?

Having committed the most horrific acts of international terrorism, Viren Sahai (Bachchan) discovers that his family is kidnapped.

We know what the film's awesome villain doesn't. His family is whisked away by young Aryan (debutant Aryeman) and his friends (reminiscent of "Ghayal"). Aryan has an axe to grind. His hero, his brother Shekhar (Akshay Kumar), is snuffed out in a brilliantly orchestrated car-park shootout.

From there on, the plot winds its way through a galloping pace. The narrative energy is undeniable. So is Santoshi's trademark mood of clenched tension that is scattered all over the film.

But the storytelling is often imbalanced. Santoshi keeps jumping into a beehive of activity. This time he doesn't always emerge with a coherently designed pastiche of anger and catharsis.

And though Abbas Ali Moghal's stunts are riveting they lack the electric immediacy of what we saw in Santoshi's "Khakee".

Bachchan in yet another towering performance rides the film's improbabilities and unnecessary jump cuts, creating what could comfortably be dubbed his most grey character ever.

The dubbing, though, leaves much to be desired. At places where the original soundtrack has been retained the Bachchan baritone is indecipherable. Elsewhere his original voice has been clumsily matched by a mimic artiste.

But you cannot redo Bachchan's baritone without undoing it...The uneven voice quality notwithstanding the narrative just swims the smoggy suburban skyline, creating a world as Shakespearean as it is contemporary in its moral murkiness.

The endgame where the gang-lord comes face to face with the harsh reality of his family life gone to waste is peerless.

Whether it's a twitch of his lips or his anguished regret at having lost his family for a precious kingdom, Bachchan blows the screen apart.

Akshay's lighter moments at the outset again show the hand of a director who knows how to get stars to look exciting on screen. For some strange reason, the supporting cast is not used to the optimum by the director. A talented actress like Shernaz Patel is completely wasted in the archetypal role of Bachchan's morally upright wife.

There's a sense of hastened narration this time, not to be seen in the director's previous films. The frenetic pace often sacrifices the lucidity that one would expect in a Santoshi creation.

The self-consciously peppy songs and over-emphasised background score (Ram Sampat) could have avoided being so predictable.

And really...is the debutant hero Aryeman capable of shouldering the whole film on his broad but insipid shoulders?