We as an audience sometimes try to relate life with cinema. When they don’t match, we take the film as unrealistic, melodrama, impractical. We tend to forget that cinema can just be for cinema – for fun, for the show, for the entertainment. This affects the makers – the directors face a critical challenge of answering to themselves as to where to draw the line, where to touch down, where to fly. I feel this shackles down a huge section of the movie makers. Khuda Haafiz suffers from that fear of overdoing and almost ends up not doing enough. The plot line with a certain Vidyut Jammwal as the hero wants to fly away high in the action genre, but Faruk Kabir doesn’t allow that. He strives to find balance and logic. That makes it tough for Vidyut, whose mojo is contained in the punches. But that does allow for a movie experience which doesn’t suffer from the “Bhai Syndrome”. At any time it could have gone there, but it didn’t and at the end Khuda Haafiz becomes a good film for the critiquing audience and an okayish film for the entertainment industry.
It is a simple couple’s story of love, and what a man can do for his woman, the lengths he can travel and the struggles he can face. When Sameer (Vidyut) learns that his wife Nargis (played by the absolutely beautiful looking Shivaleeka Oberoi), is abducted for woman trafficking in a middle-east country in the name of a job – he is devasted. He feels helpless – he cannot take down an entire country (like Tiger did in Baaghi 3), nor can he fight his way out in a foreign land amongst foreign, stronger people.(Oh! He also cannot fire rocket launchers or hand held machine guns from the blue). Yes, you feel why stay here for the rest of it ? But that somehow made wait. The movie took the courage of going through the process of how an average man can go and find his wife back without being extraordinary. Yes he fights, but those are more instinctive. Yes, he is extraordinarily brave, but we can call it love.
Vidyut tried and tried all he could to act, yes in some places he did, but believe me – you should see him fighting more often than acting. He looks rough, battered, lost and broken. Full marks for trying, lesser marks for actual achievement. Shivaleeka is soft, mellow and didn’t have much to do either. Annu Kapoor is fantastic and Shiv Pandit looks dashing.
This movie mixes the emotions with the situations so oddly well. A heart-wrenching melody plays in the background, slowly and softly while in the scene Sameer is getting peltered and hitting back with knives, rods, guns and what not.
Khuda Hafiz falls into that confused genre of whether to go beyond or be satisfied with less. It is a sunday afternoon’s lazy watch where adrenalines are ready to be pumped but aren’t, where you almost wait for that typical, commercial, massy climax but it never happens. Some scenes are dragged, as we wait for action and at other times, just amidst a high-intensity moment, a song pops up. Rather it is toned down to practical grounds and don’t take me wrong, I am not complaining, I am just saying that the plot line, this genre doesn’t allow that much space to tone the tempo down. These movies need to be always happening at every minute of every scene, but here it doesn’t quite feel the rush. The rush makes the action genre what it is, here the lack of it makes Khuda Hafiz, a well made film, which could have done so much better, but didn’t. It chooses the wrong genre, the wrong man for the right plot.
My rating 2.5/5.
Article by : Anish Banerjee.
Critiquesque 