I finally saw Azhar!  There was a confluence of circumstances which prevented me from seeing it opening night, like I usually do, but I was finally able to get to it last night.  And the theater was actually pretty full!  Like. a couple dozen other people along with me and my friend!  I am impressed.

At least, I was impressed with the popularity of the film on a weeknight.  Not with the film itself.  It was not great.  It could have been great.  But it wasn’t.

Emraan did an okay job, but I suspect his performance was more about impersonation than creating a character?  And I don’t follow cricket, so I have no context for what Azhar was like in real life, and I couldn’t appreciate the (presumably) excellence of his impersonation.

Beyond his acting, what did they do to his face?  His beautiful beautiful face?  No scruff, that was a hard loss, but what’s going on with his forehead?  Some kind of smoothing and widening?  Or is it just a really unflattering wig?  And his lips looked so thin!  They are his trademark, the Emraan lips, and they were all pale and lifeless and with no pizzazz.

(See?  What happened?!?!?)

But the make-up was just the tip of the iceberg.  There was also the script, which was terrible.  No one had real conversations!  It was all pronouncements “Remember, if you ever feel alone, I am with you” “You gave your wife your name, give her your loyalty” “Let your bat do your talking for you.”  And badly written pronouncements too!  I mean, much of Deewar, for instance, is just pronouncements to the camera, but they are so well written, who cares?  But this was just terrible and obvious and awkward.

The filming was as blunt and awkward as the script.  There was one good reveal at intermission, and a clever intercutting towards the end, but otherwise it was pretty by the numbers.  Exactly what you think will come next is what comes next.  The exact angle you think will be used for this scene is what is used for this scene.  Blah blah blah.

And the filming really had to be fantastic if it was going to work, because the budget was like $5 and a can of coke.  Which really showed in the lack of extras and speaking parts.  I never got a sense of a mob of people, a packed courtroom, a stadium full of fans.  If the director had been cleverly with his angles and his edits, he could have given us that feeling, even with just 20 people, but he wasn’t that clever.  This story should be Epic, and instead of felt High School.

Which brings me to the characters!  Who all had entirely High School style motivations and personas, only occasionally elevated by performances which rose above the script.  Emraan and his lawyer/friend Kunal Roy Kapoor were predictably excellent, and managed to infuse a bit of personality and motivation and feelings into their roles.

Prachi Desai was unexpectedly good.  Or maybe she can just play this one part really well?  I’ve seen her in Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, Rock On, and now this, and she always plays the long-suffering faithful young wife/lover.  And she’s great at it!  I find her completely sympathetic and believable in all of those movies.  But someday I would like to see her play a career woman or a temptress or something, just to see if she can.  Anyway, her onscreen presence was enough to elevate her character in a way that just wasn’t in the script.

(I forgot!  She did play a temptress!  And apparently, it wasn’t memorable at all, since I didn’t remember until just now)

Lara Dutta was, well, Lara Dutta.  I understand why they cast her, they wanted someone with a powerful glamorous international feel to her performance, and Lara Dutta is great for that.  Also, I am really enjoying Lara’s recent dive into character parts, I think it’s great that she is transitioning to that instead of just fading into obscurity the way most actresses do after 35.

But NARGIS!!!  OH MY GOSH!!!  An ocean of suck every time she is on screen.  Can’t act, can’t dance, can’t move her mouth anymore (how much collagen is in there?), can’t be shorter than Emraan, definitely can’t make us sympathize with her “other woman” character.  And it’s not helping that the film is trying to sell Sangeeta as this huge big deal movie star and amazingly beautiful woman and so on, when we all know she was most famous for dating Salman and marrying Azhar, not any “acting” she did.  So I guess in that way, it makes sense to cast Nargis!  More famous for dating Uday Chopra than she ever has been for her “acting”.

Let’s see, what else?  The soundtrack was great, but they short-changed the song sequences.  Two love songs, one for Prachi and one for Nargis, but all the other songs were just quick samples, not full sequences.

There was absolutely no effort at period clothing or period anything, including rampant use of cell-phones in the love song between Emraan and Nargis, which would have been in 1996 at the latest since they got married in ’97.  Which was such a missed opportunity, because they could have had a lot of fun with period touches!  Maybe another sacrifice to the small budget?

So, generally speaking, if you want to watch a lightly fictionalized story of Azhar’s life, you are better off sticking with Chak De India.

(Also, the songs are better)