Wazir Hindi Movie Review

Bejoy Nambiar sure improves on his earlier works. An ensemble that includes the like of Amitabh Bachchan and Farhan Akhtar is sure to carry a degree of quality and style and those exactly are the values that the film offers. Built around two principal characters that are out to avenge the tragic death of their respective daughters they move with sharp intelligence. The parallels with the game of chess are added for a dramatic context. The mainstay of the tale in spite of a clear story line is not so much the story as it is those who work to tell it on screen. The taut tale told in less than two hours is fluent in movement and undemanding in style. The film’s cinematographer (Sanu Vargese) and editing team (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Abhijat Joshi) keep the narration away from needless dramatics. In retrospect that could well be its undoing for it finally ends up lacking the required punch for a period of time to keep the viewer engaged and interested for long.
The film starts with style. Danish Ali (Farhaan) is an army officer who loses his daughter in a shootout with militants. He rushes where others would think twice to tread. His colleague at work stand by him but his rush of blood robs him of his job when he rushes and kills members of a militant group that has arrived in Delhi to meet a political heavy weight in the capital. Danish’s wife Roohana (a synthetic Aditi Rao) blames him for the death of the daughter. On a rainy night at the crematorium mourning his dead daughter, Danish is introduced to Pandit Omkarnath Dhar (Amitabh) who also suffers the death of his daughter. However unlike Danish he takes things in his hands. He for some inexplicable reason runs a chess campaign and is teaching kids the nuances of the game. He introduces the game to Danish with profound statements that: the game gives you another chance, life does not etc. The script now lays bare the fact that the common enemy is the local Minister Qurieshi (Manav Kaur). It is seen that Qureishi”s daughter (Mazel Vyas) is used as the token of peace in the valley by the Minister while in Delhi he is the Mr Hyde willing to shoot people at will and push them of stair cases the dimensional details of which are not lost on the victim’s father. Pandit Omkar tutors Danish on the methodology to catch up with the enemy. In the meanwhile we have a cameo from Wazir? (Neil Nitin) who attacks Omkar and starts threatening the avengers, always a step ahead of them.
In case he is the secondary villain of the piece why does the film get named after him? How and why is he the crux of the tale. That is Bejoy Nambiar telling you the tale. Our cinema continues to be either tardy with tis content or goes to the other extreme of placing style way ahead of content. Bijoy too is guilty of the later. Where he wins his points is that the cast is near perfect. Manav Kaur as the Minister is near perfect. He eschews the usual cinematic potholes of interpreting our villains and is cool without being needlessly dramatic or visibly evil. Amitabh for some strange reason has decided to go the Gulshan Grover way of paying a lot of attention to costume to narrate a character. He also invests in the character and gives it the characteristic life that he is capable of. Not great but adequate enough and given our cinema where character of that age have no cinematic space he gives it credibility by his presence. Then there is Farhaan. He emotes with consummate ease and shows how well he understands the media. As the enraged father, the helpless one, the loosing husband, the intrigued student, he gets all the shades of his character to near perfection. Neil Nithin as Wazir paradoxically gets the most ill defined role and hams (obviously at the demands of the film maker) his way through.
Amitabh’s career in a way has come a full circle From the morose angry inspector in Zanjeer he now plays the role of the old man (a la Pran doing Yaari hai imaan mere yaar mere zindagi ) now doing Atrangi Yaari. He tells his young friend: Mein ek dost ko hasna sikha diya. Bijoy however just falls short of making such a claim on his audience.

Rating : 2.5 stars
_ Energy and punch
+ performances and crew.