Covering Bollywood and the Hindi Cinema

This Friday saw three brand new movies debuting including Awarapan. Indiatimes reviews the movie and here are some excerpts:

The Bhatt camp is known for providing us with unique cinema and that’s what they do here as well, but unfortunately director Mohit’s idea of expanding an incident in the life of a man into an entire two hour film falls flat.

Shivam (Emraan) is an atheist henchman of Mallik (Ashutosh Rana), a rich hotelier cum businessman involved in flesh trade and many such illegitimate activities in Hong Kong. Shivam follows Mallik’s orders blindly. He kills people if necessary, runs Mallik’s hotel, keeps an eye on his mistress and in no time becomes his confidante. But this strong bond between the two develops crack when Shivam is assigned the job of killing Mallik’s Pakistani mistress (Mrinalini Sharma, extremely ordinary). The entire film then shows what is it that makes it impossible for a cold blooded shooter like Shivam to accomplish his gangster boss’ ‘kill my mistress’ request…

The first half of the film drags enormously and by the time the film picks up in the second half, you are already bored. The film is extremely serious and tries to show the dilemma of a sensitive heartbroken aashiq (Emraan) and thus if you are going through ‘without my lover’ phase too, do carry a hanky along, as there is loads to sob about. Also if you are an avid watcher of ‘escapist and feel good films’ or ‘entertaining’ films, this film is not for you, so just stay away.

In fact the film won’t work for anyone except for those Emraan Hashmi fans, who often pray to see him act without performing his trademark ‘smooches’! Awaarapan’s only USP is the fact that in the history of Indian cinema, you’ll see an Emraan Hashmi keeping his heroines at an arms length!Shreya Saran (acts well), promoted by the film unit as the lead heroine, surprisingly does a cameo; while Mrinalini walks away with a meatier role, which she doesn’t do justice to at all.

Awaarapan, a tale of a heartbroken bloke and his excessive love for a woman will fail to satisfy even the hardcore lovers of mushy romance, leave alone the aam junta… We tackle a huge amount of depression on a daily basis anyways; don’t need Shivam’s extra emotional baggage to add to it!