Review of Shagird (2011) by Familiar S — 02 Jul 2011

The first half: The way things turned out looked too nonsensical. But I thought that it's a work of fiction, so I shouldn't mind that. Then one after another illogical events, to the extent that I lost the count, left me in a fit of rage. Yet I consoled myself thinking that it's a Bollywood flick, and therefore the compromise with logic was obvious and inevitable (although for most of such scenes, I felt it was easily avoidable). But I could hardly hold myself together when I found some of the accomplished actors' overacting. While most of the dialogues were alright, some of them were indeed idiotic.

If you've managed to survive the first half, the second half is surprisingly good. No, no, it's nothing incredible or ground-breaking, but it'll make you feel good after what you've been just through. It's miles better than the first half, but it surely does have its share of drawbacks. So don't misunderstand that you're gonna have a perfect second half.

Coming to performances, Nana Patekar was excellent as usual. Rimi Sen and the other two actors playing the role of journalists could have done better. Anurag Kashyap was okay. Mohit Ahlawat was a real discovery here. He surely has the potential to give a great deal if exploited appropriately.

Tigmanshu Dhulia has already established himself as a seasoned director in Bollywood (despite of the fact that he's given just a couple of films), but if this is how he uses the sources available to him, I wonder what would be the qualifications of a bad director. I can't (and won't) claim to be a perfect audience and have almost always maintained my odd taste for movies, but some things are so blatant that hardly anyone would have a different opinion about them.

Oh, and w.r.t. this movie's being inspired from Training Day. While there's quite a lot of difference between the two movies, I can't deny that there are a bit too many similarities in the main plot to be coincidental.