Azhar Movie Review & Ratings Public

Directed by: Tony D'Souza

Starring: Emraan Hashmi, Prachi Desai, Nargis Fakhri, Lara Dutta, Kunal Roy Kapoor, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Shernaz Patel

Mohammad Azharuddin may or may not have sold out his team and country, but at least he was never boring. One cannot say the same for Azhar, Tony D’Souza’s inert biopic on the former Indian captain. The film focuses on everything that made Azhar controversial the match-fixing allegations that got him banned from the sport, his leaving his first wife for actress Sangeeta Bijlani and pays little attention to what made him memorable : the elegance of his batting, his cat-like fielding, the lazy nonchalance, the popped collar.

The film fails in its treatment of all three aspects of Azhar’s life.

While his initially hesitant and then comfortably boring relationship with his first wife is well established, it skims over his liaison with his second wife. In fact, Sangeeta remains a distant creature throughout, a woman he seems to have fallen for primarily out of sympathy when he realises that glamour dolls have feelings.

More disappointingly, Azhar does not even touch upon the potential communal angle, an element that was handled with such delicacy and beauty in Shimit Amin’s Chak De! India (2007) starring Shah Rukh Khan.

The film truly does itself in though by inexplicably serving up very little cricket. Even the worst screenplay might have been lifted by some suspenseful on-screen matches, but Azhar remains a sports film sans the sport.

By not even bothering to address that point, this film lets down the man whose reputation it appears to be trying to redeem in the public eye.

A scene in the latter half of Azhar indicates the potential of Azharuddin’s story. Now hated by the fans who once adored him, Azhar is running out of platforms to interact with the public and press. His lawyer forces him to inaugurate a gym to keep up the appearance that life is going on as usual. The owner of the gym though turns out to be an obnoxious fellow who thinks he owns Azhar since he has paid for his time.

This moment harks back to one of the nicest scenes in the recent SRK-starrer Fan in which we saw the boorishness of an industrialist towards a major movie star. Away from the spotlight, the rich and the famous often deal with heartburn, heartbreak and humiliation to get to where they are and stay there. Mohammad Azharuddin’s success and subsequent fall from grace were as public as it can get.

Azhar is a superficial look at the life of one of the most enigmatic and intriguing sporting stars this country has ever seen. It is an opportunity lost.

Star Rating : 4.0/5.0