Khuda Haafiz

When I first saw the trailer of Khuda Haafiz, the feeling I got was that perhaps we may have a movie that would show, how Baaghi 3 should have been to be actually entertaining. But when it comes to the movie, the dullness in the presentation is ridiculously high. In a movie that had Vidyut Jamwal as a hero trying to save his wife without any support from a mighty flesh trading nexus in another country, I was expecting some excitement in the form of action, but sadly it couldn’t even provide that level of entertainment.  

The story is set in 2008. Sameer Choudhary and his wife Nargis Choudhary have lost their jobs due to the recession that was happening all over the globe. In order to move forward, they both decided to apply for jobs in the Middle East and Nargis got the first call from Noman. But very soon after Nargis’ arrival, Sameer gets a call from her saying that things have gone terribly wrong. Khuda Haafiz is showing us how Sameer goes to Noman and fights against the odds to rescue his wife from flesh traders.

Faruk Kabir seems to have a fascination for creating crowded set pieces. But this movie written by him has hardly any sort of depth or sense. In all his action movies, Vidyut Jamwal has played characters that have some martial arts backdrop. Here he is presented as a mere common man who used to work as a software engineer and yet we get to see a sequence where he is stabbing dozens of men and jumping from buildings. Faruk Kabir might have felt that since it is Vidyut Jamwal people won’t think about such nonsensical aspects of the story. The writing here is super lazy. The director is skipping through events to get to the major junctions in the story. Somewhere we are given a promise that Vidyut is going to unleash upon those bad people, but that never really happened and all we get to see is a chase on the road which also ends abruptly.

It was learned that prior to his long-delayed Yaara, Vidyut took some acting classes to get into the character. Well, one can sense a considerable improvement in his range of expression, but the martial arts star just doesn’t know how to keep it subtle. The believability was hardly there in his performance. Shivleeka Oberoi hardly has anything to do here rather than being a pretty face at the beginning of the movie. Annu Kapoor delivers an earnest performance as the Taxi driver Usman.   Shiv Pandit and Ahana Kumra have played the roles of the Noman officials who help Sameer in finding Nargis and I got to say this, that accent was nothing short of hilarious. Almost felt like they were mimicking Sacha Baron Cohen from The Dictator.

The development of the story on a screenplay level is the major fault in the case of Khuda Haafiz. You can see them stretching the story to connect the basic plot points. There are no layers or surprises here. You can see the twists from a comfortable distance and even the dream sequences were captured in a lame way. Faruk Kabir is confused about how to place his hero in the movie. In one scene he is shivering with fear and anger and in another scene, he is acting like a killing machine. It is almost like Sameer doesn’t know he has a dual personality disorder and the second person inside him is the ghost of Rambo. The cinematography of the movie is trying to give it some sense of grandeur through a lot of aerial shots. The cuts here are absolutely clumsy. The fight sequences were horribly treated on the edit table and even the pacing of the movie was grumpy. The melodramatic music was actually in sync with the dull mood of the film.

In the end, Khuda Haafiz isn’t providing any of the things one would have expected to see the trailer. The action here is unappealing and the emotional story is largely dull. It was a great opportunity to make a pleasing commercial potboiler, but the cluelessness made a mess of it.

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