Team FC
Stupendous sets, gorgeous costuming, and some fairly good acting did not prop up Anurag Kashyap's period crime drama, whose plot was too meandering and too flimsy to hold up under pressure.
A film with an identity crisis, Anurag Basu's adventure about a young man searching for his father was also trying to be a romance and a musical and a thriller and a drama. It was ultimately too many things at once, and not particularly good in any avatar.
A remake of Forrest Gump should have worked easily, and Atul Kulkarni's adaptation picked some of the more interesting pieces of recent Indian history, but Aamir Khan single-handedly derailed the film with his catastrophic performance.
Aside from the concept of Hindu mythology merging with fantasy elements, nothing worked in the Ayan Mukerji film: trite dialogues, a tired soundtrack, even more tired actors, nobody seemed invested in making this labour of love.
What should have been an interesting juxtaposition between the coming-of-age of a young army officer and a people became one laborious concoction of a film, with too many extraneous subplots distracting from the central thrust of the film, and none of the magnificence of the war film coming through.
Vicky Kaushal's performance saved Meghna Gulzar's uninspired, insipid take on the life of Field Marshal SHFJ Manekshaw, MC from being a complete trainwreck. The film had little to no interest in the man, and its attempts at mythmaking were tame, to say the least.
Zoya Akhtar added herself to the list of good directors swinging and missing big time with her teleportation of The Archies to an Indian hillstation. There was no narrative push, little in terms of visual flair, and some truly appalling acting offered by the three leads.
Thank you for reading!