Nawaz Was Here(Voice Only)

Nawazuddin is so underused that his role might as well be billed as a guest appearance. The “hero,” on the other hand, is determined to be everything.

First, he wants to be Sunny Deol, the man who can down a dozen goons with sheer power. Fair enough; his father did direct Gadar. The trouble is that every muscle in his body put together might weigh less than one dhai kilo ka haath, and that turns every fight sequence into comedy.

Weighed it. Came to 900 grams.

He is also super smart, so of course he is the JEE topper. Yet this genius picks IIT Roorkee. Someone forgot to tell him where Roorkee sits in the pecking order: so far down that Powai, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Chennai barely count it as an IIT. (Roorkee alumni, please address your hate mail to the screenwriter.)

The real star of the film is his smartphone. It controls everything: traffic lights, magical lights rising out of the grass, doors, contact lenses (wirelessly, naturally), bank servers, and other people’s email accounts.

Meanwhile, my own smartphone, after the latest iOS update, tells me I have “1 new mail.” I open the mail app. There are no unread messages.

To call the plot disjointed would be generous. Here is just one thread, untangled for your safety. Press the big red button whenever you are ready for the next twist. Keep an eye on the hero’s status board, and on the logic meter.

The absurdity doesn’t stop at the plot; it extends to everything. There’s a Himesh Reshammiya composition sung by a male voice, part of the hero’s dream sequence. Then comes a good five minutes of serious scenes. And then the very same song plays again, now in a female voice, presumably as part of the lady love’s dream. Same song. Same full length. Every single second of it.

Besides the phone, the gadgets in this film are astonishingly advanced. There’s a bomb-detection radar that can sniff out explosives within a radius of a couple of miles, yet it is fooled by cadmium paint on children’s toys.

The secret meeting room has hi-tech glass doors with fingerprint sensors built in, so you have to press your palm to the glass to get in. The glass, however, is perfectly transparent. Anyone standing outside can see the top-secret meeting, and hear every word of it too.

The lady love is presumably there as eye candy, yet we hardly see her, because whenever she gets one of her rare lines, you guessed it: the camera is busy with our hero.

The character seems to have been imagined as a cross between Rambo, Sherlock, Deol and Shah Rukh, with twenty percent of the reel devoted to close-ups in each avatar. That’s eighty percent gone. Of the remaining twenty, fifteen go to the technology, three to the lady love, and the last two to Nawazuddin.

Oh yes, Mithun Chakraborty is in the film too. At the end, he wears a little smirk, and I’m sure I know what he was thinking: