Fan

The thing with SRK’s new movie Fan was that we weren’t expecting something like his last few releases which pretty much focused on creating wafer thin storylines with dialogue jokes. The poster excited me, teaser was pretty much interesting. But after seeing certain action sequences in the trailer of Fan, the movie enthusiast in me was disappointed. When it comes to the movie, the experience is also similar. You get excited seeing the Fan Gaurav, but the development that happens after the interval looks seriously hard to digest.

Gaurav is this diehard fan of Superstar Aryan Khanna. Even his business venture is titled AK. His room is filled with Aryan’s photos, cutouts etc. Gaurav who wins the title of the best performer in his colony’s annual fest by enacting Aryan’s performances decides to go and meet his superstar in real. What happens in this journey and how that shatters Gaurav’s perception about AK and how he ultimately goes against him is what this movie talking about.

So the conflict in the movie is due to the clash between a superstar of Bollywood and some random Fan of the star from Delhi who runs an internet Café. It is one of those thoughts where you feel that if executed sensibly would become a delightful cinema. Where Fan fizzles is in creating that sensible revenge. Gaurav threatens another superstar, he follows his superstar and he is doing a great job in breaching security and making life a mess for Aryan. That’s the problem! From a sensible over reacting fan, Gaurav sort of transforms to Hrithik Roshan/Aamir Khan/ John Abraham of Yash Raj’s Dhoom series. And Aryan Khanna who in the end of first half tells his fan that he is an ordinary man with all normal emotions is somewhat an Ethan Hunt/ James Bond by doing all the bike stunts, roof top jumping and all. This over imagination goes to very difficult zones where you might even want to rename the movie’s name to Duplicate.

The only thing that worked wonderfully for me in this film is Shah Rukh Khan’s performance. He brings grace to the screen by portraying entirely different characters with a much needed perfection. AK and Gaurav are distinguishably different and that is not just because of the VFX/ Makeup. Except for SRK there isn’t much of a detailed role for other actors. It is not a conventional Shah Rukh khan film. Deepika Amin and Yogendra Tiku were good as the parents.

Maneesh Sharma has a grip over the movie in the first half. Even the slightly indigestible “threatening” part and the whole chase to catch Gaurav were conceived in a good way. But as I have been saying, it all got a bit messed up in the second half. The ambitious tactics used in the screenplay to show Gaurav’s level of hatred looked too much to digest and Maneesh Sharma couldn’t add much of a sensibility in those areas. The screenplay’s dramatic nature only got higher and higher as the film progressed. There are moments you sort of feel for the love Gaurav has for AK, but the fact that all these exaggerated things were what he did for that clearly bothers you. Edits were good from Namrata Rao. The cinematography was okay. Italian composer Andrea Guerra’s partially Desi style BGM was also nice. The visual effects part was good.

To sum it up, I would say Fan is pretty much for the fans of Shah Rukh Khan. The sort of expectation I had about this film wasn’t met. They constructed characters nicely, but failed to build a convincing battle between the two.