Veer-Zaara

Many people have told me how much they hate this movie and that aroused my interest. I finally caught this movie recently just to figure out what went wrong. Anil Sharma’s Sunny Deol starrer Gadar seems to have provided some inspiration to this movie. Being a Chopra production, the accent is more on romance and keeping in tune with the times, the movie tries to promote friendship between India and Pakistan. I found Gadar to be far more appealing. That movie was a masala entertainer that didn’t claim to be too much more. However, this one is thorough manipulative crap that aims to be called a classic.

The movie is about the romance between an Indian boy and a Pakistani girl like Gadar. The difference lies in the fact that the boy doesn’t get the girl and instead ends up in jail in Pakistan for 22 years for quite a dumb reason. After all those years, a female Pakistani lawyer tries to get him out. What happens after or, for that matter, before is quite boring and hackneyed.

The actors do a decent job of mouthing the long and cliched dialogue (Aditya Chopra). I really wouldn’t want to evaluate the acting because of my dislike for the roles that were portrayed. Though Shahrukh and Priety play the leads, the supporting cast including Rani Mukherjee, Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Manoj Bajpai, Kiron Khen and Divya Dutta are more likeable. The music is a mixed bag. Madan Mohan’s unused tunes are recreated by his son Sanjeev Kohli and at least half of them were very appealing (though some of them don’t appear in the final cut). I do wish that Lata Mangeshkar doesn’t sing anymore for young girls because it just doesn’t gel. The background score wasn’t very good except for the fact that it achieved its goal of accentuating the melodrama for most part. The attention to detail in diction and art direction (Sharmishta Roy) is praiseworthy. Cinematography (Anil Mehta) is good too.

Yash Chopra’s direction is decent but the writing (Aditya Chopra) is poor. Every aspect of the plot has been seen before. Everything is overdone and quite laughable. Girls falling in love after their engagement has been done to death since Aditya’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. There are huge plot holes but you hope that the movie gets better (especially after the flashback ends and the court case starts) but it never does. I really felt like crying by the end of the movie not due to the emotiononal intensity of the movie but due to the contrived hogwash that just kept piling on till the end (and it reaches its peak during Shahrukh’s final speech). Watch this movie if you aren’t likely to be put off by an unimaginative melodrama that has nothing new to offer.