Movie review- Ishqzaade

Sadly, the banner of Yashraj films has stopped being reminiscent of the great Yash Chopra. It is high time he removed his good name from the banner if he is unable to contribute in any way other than his name to the productions because the people who have succeeded him are not doing justice to his name. Ishqzaade has the signature undertone of Yash Chopra’s works in the past but hardly has the same effect. In fact, Ishqzaade has disappointed me thoroughly. One factor that I guess has contributed to this film’s failure to leave an impact is the fact that the entire cast and crew is rookie- from the director, lyricists, actors to the music director.  The storyline appears promising in the beginning, but couldn’t be developed into a great story, and the acting, dialogue delivery by the main actors leaves a lot to be desired. One major flaw is that the male lead (Parma, played by Arjun Kapoor), who is to be shown to be having grey shades to his character ends up being portrayed more grey than white. In fact, for most part of the movie I hated Parma for his doings. Even when he is supposed to be actually nice, he is unconvincing, and appears as if he’d back-stab any time. He’d have been better as a proper anti-hero, rather than a hero.

Parma (Arjun Kapoor) and Zoya (Pareeniti Chopra) are scions of rival political families in a town, probably in Uttar-Pradesh, who have grown up together under rather a unfriendly political and personal atmosphere, with the opening shots the showing school-going version of our protagonists  indulging in generous exchange of gaalis (Not the BC, MC kinds but the haraamzaada, kutta-kameena types). Both families have gun-totting goons around them all the time who never think twice before shooting a volley of bullets on anything and everything. Zoya’s father (Aftaab Qureshi) is a sitting MLA, and Parma’s grandfather (Surya Chauhan) is the rival, and the assembly elections are imminent. Both families are hard into preparations for the elections and keep looking to scoring brownie points over each other. Parma is a spoilt brat, and moves around with his goons in open jeep on the streets of his town terrorizing and plundering the local people at will. He sets fire to a local diesel supplier’s depot just because he is reluctant to sell him diesel owning to a prior commitment. How can the director expect the audience to fall in love with such a guy under any circumstances, no matter how much time has elapsed in the movie? Zoya is shown to be a pretty girl with political ambitions who doesn’t think twice before swapping her ear-rings for a gun. She too drives around in an open jeep, chases Parma’s goons on it when needed and fires upon them as well. Once, while she is holding a ‘rally’ on her dad’s behalf, addressing mostly college students, Parma shoos off the audience with a string of crackers and pee’s upon her dad’s poster. This infuriates zoya who slaps him in the full view of everyone. The story takes an interesting turn here with both of them falling in love with each other after this episode but I can’t tell you what happens because it’ll spoil whatever little bit of interesting stuff  there is in the movie for you all. The rest of the story is about the drama of these two young lovers trying to be together and their respective families trying to separate them off.

The movie theme might be reminiscent of ‘Veer-Zaara’ with the same theme of inter-religion love story but I’d say Ishqzaade is nowhere close to being anywhere near Veer-Zaara. The location, photography, the selection of local dialect, everything is to order but the story as a whole disappoints.

The performances are ok, below par, I’d say. Arjun Kapoor might appear hot to girls with a muscular raw body with a stubble on his chiseled face, and Pareeniti Chopra’s girl-next-door looks is sure to attract a lot of young men, but their acting skills leave a lot to be desired. Their dialogue delivery is poor and unconvincing. Pareeniti’s giggles, at times, appear so artificial that I felt like pulling my hair out. There are explicit sex scenes involving the two lead actors, but I’d say that the storyline needed them to be there, so if you have children along with you in the movie (Ishqzaade had a U/A certificate), you might need to close their eyes just a bit, but then, on second thoughts, WTF…

The numbers are ok..they might need to be heard several times before I start liking a few tracks but they’re not great for sure.

My rating: 1.5 on 5