Subhash Ghai’s new flick hasn’t arrived with the same thump as Kisna did three years back, but is expected to disappear in similar fashion - soundlessly - largely due to overdone dialogue and the lack of enough moments to keep the viewer interested. It’s dreary, and you end up leaving your seats both unexcited and unaffected.
Which is a real shame considering the intent was great, and the plot is genuinely germane. Anurag Sinha plays an Afghan Jehadi who hits Delhi in the guise of Numair Qazi, an angry, quiet youth ‘orphaned’ in the Gujarat violence by Hindus, justifying his hatred towards the ‘disbelievers’. And the mission? Simple - to blast the Red Fort on Independence Day. Unfortunately, the suicide bomber bumps into Rajan Mathur (Anil Kapoor), an Urdu professor at Delhi University and a secular patriot who makes every effort to bring peace between Muslims and Hindus in Chandni Chowk. That’s when he’s not having to quieten his fiery wife, Roma (a mind-blowing Shefali Shah). The couple take Numair into their own family, giving him the warmth, happiness and love that he perhaps always yearned for, triggering a thought-process in his mind, and asking a few questions, as the audience begin to wonder if he would complete his mission or not.
Gripping, one would think? Well, no. Pitifully, the movie remains uninteresting throughout, and is saved by Anil Kapoor’s class act blending power with charisma, more than ably supported by Shefali Shah’s magically thunderous expressions. Even Habib Tanvir as Gaffar Bhai, the poet, turns out really well but is overused, and it’s Anurag Sinha with his forceful, prevailing presence that keeps you on your seat post-interval. He has few lines to mumble, a mis-hit if you ask me with the depth in his voice, but worse, the dialogues that he eventually ends up with are oh-so-heavy, with the subtlety dying a horrific death, that it’s too direct for the viewer to appreciate. Yes, the background score helps because it touches you, but the songs fail miserably, unnaturally enforced upon us when the movie has already been so dull.
But the big crime is the screenplay, flawed beyond repair. If your brains accompany you to the movie (like mine did as it ought to) you’d see photographers innocently using a flash at a jehadi site, terrorists’ accomplices set free with no explanation whatsoever, top-notch jawans struggling to chase a terrorist sprinting on foot and - strangely - a professor randomly showing up in the line of fire as snipers plant a headshot to put down a running criminal. Yes, it’s loaded with scenes where you find it all implausible, save for the frames that depict the terrorists’ technology, done clinically and with class, a genre that Bollywood has both flirted with and abused with little success.
Make no mistake, the idea at heart deserves recognition, that a terrorist can indeed be reformed, and the Delhi locales even seduce you towards patriotism, although it’s often blemished by unwarranted, unrealistic stock footage sprinkled in ungainly towards the end. The handling isn’t that delicate enough, and the substandard execution makes this movie yet another dud from the Ghai camp, a real disappointment considering the brilliant cast and crew and the showman himself.
And no, I can’t disclose if the terrorist does manages to bomb the Red Fort in the end, but I can tell you this: something else is expected to bomb - at the box-office over the weekend - and you don’t get prizes for guessing what it is. Or was.
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