Ishaqzaade is not entertaining zaada!

There is a big deal of cinema, loaded in Ishaqzaade. Spectacularly, the Hindi new age cinema, if only it was consistent enough and characters, even though rooted, were not burdened with same dramatic stupidity. That is specifically for the second half, when the whole film leaves its build up behind and takes a short cut to the culmination.

The actual problem with Ishaqzaade lies in taking itself too seriously. While it tries real hard to be a very cool film, all the effort goes down the drain because of inconsistencies. Not that it absolutely isn’t, for the most of the first half, it is, witty and funny and energetic. But in the second half, it becomes so unfocussed and it is just not startling or abrupt as it should be. The scene composition is authentic but it is not engaging and at times, it does become preachy and so disastrously avoids its natural attitude, needless to say interest is lost.

While I could blame the second half for the rest of the review, first half too isn’t absolutely clean, and at times it does feel overdone. The film is perhaps one of the very few films that goes up and jumps from that height to fall flat. Despite superior characterization and a truckload full of talented supporting characters, they can’t save the ship from sinking. Perhaps the hints are there at the very beginning of the film and you just feel weakness at places but still fun is there, so you kind of ignore it and join the action packed romance.

But after some time, the way it progresses, it becomes apparent that even if something really unpredictable happens, if it does, would not be surprising. One simply watches the film, with shades and hints of goodness amongst plain ordinary that continues to be prevalent despite severe attempts at humour which occasionally work and occasionally fail.

Sometimes I wonder when a director has a script in his hand and visualizes his scenes, can’t he feel that he is losing interest or he is being repetitive and his characters are losing that charm with which they seduce the audiences or even they could titillate them. Even with sincere dedication actors who look like they should, talk like the way they should, but all that cannot avoid the loss of involvement, and at the end of it, it really doesn’t matter where they would end up.

Ishaqzaade couldn’t bring variety to the overall package, it is just another film with the same story, where the film maker tries to add a typical flavor and an issue but losing the punch somewhere in between and it turned out to be what it is, a just another film.

The story starts with kids fighting off and raised with hatred to each other and their politically countering families, and they fall in love from there on, it is a flavoured, tasteful film, starting off with startling twists, and ultimately losing itself to too much of Indian conventional cinema.

Film makers, I have recently noticed, seem to be short of ideas. In this particular film I have seen the director take short-cuts one after another. Things are taken too simplistically and nuanced characters suddenly become singular toned. It was the 1990s when characters were singular toned, and precisely for a good part of this film, characters were random and brutally interesting, but suddenly they become the old, seen-that stuff.

As the film ended it becomes a matter of consideration that characters are no longer with you in an awe inspiring fashion. They were there inside, they were good looking, occasionally lovely, at times funny but ultimately distant and they just didn’t bite hard enough to retain heartache.

Salil Shankar

Film-maker || Technical Writer || Blogger

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