Jazbaa

If you have seen the movie Seven Days, you will know that there is enough scope to be creative if someone is trying to remake it. But when it comes to Jazbaa, the comeback movie of beauty queen Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, there is this desperation from the side of director Sanjay Gupta to plant the same scenes in the backdrop of Mumbai. With heroism and drama killing the sort of realness the narrative should have had, Jazbaa lacks impact.

Anuradha Verma is a renowned advocate who has a great track record. The single mom gets into a messy situation when her daughter got kidnapped by some guy who demanded her to be the advocate of a criminal who is in the verge of death penalty. How Anuradha handles the situation with the help of her friend Yohan, a suspended police officer is what Jazbaa from Sanjay Gupta all about.

Sanjay Gupta seems to have forgotten the time factor which was driving the original movie forward. Here the writers aren’t that focused about the limited time window the chief protagonist had. It is a scene by scene copy and Gupta along with Robin Bhatt hasn’t tried anything to reinterpret the situations and some dialogues also sounded exactly like the subtitle of the Korean film. There is one scene right after the interval where you can clearly see Aishwarya and Irrfan struggling to contain the drama.

On screen Aishwarya had that powerfulness at some areas in her portrayal, but she loses grip in certain emotional scenes. Irrfan Khan was struggling to find the right balance. The typical cool attitude was given to his character in the beginning and later on he was made in to a numb Romeo which wasn’t at all required. Shabana Azmi managed to handle the drama. Chandan Roy Sanyal and Siddhanth Kapoor were good in their respective characters. Veterans like Atul Kulkarni and Jackie Shroff played their part convincingly.

Sanjay Gupta in his typical grey styled frames tries to pitch the story in the most dramatic manner. The sort of camera work and fast paced edits seven days had really made an impact and those two departments were dull in Jazbaa. The DI works is uneven and a lady who saw the movie complained that projector had some problem (I guess she doesn’t know Sanjay Gupta’s love for darkness). As I already mentioned, the screenplay doesn’t dare to attempt a reinterpretation of events. There is this attempt towards the end to give the movie a social commitment makeover along with an unspoken love which looked lame. Music was good (except for that party song), but Gupta places it at irrelevant areas.

Overall, Jazbaa disappoints with its drama and lack of creativity. Irrfan Khan’s full on attitude dialogues may offer you some discrete moments of fun, but ultimately the movie doesn’t create much of a wave. Rating is 2/5.