Star Cast: Jimmy Shergill, Ashutosh Rana, Sanjay Suri, Narendra Jha, Suha Gezen
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Director: Jitendra Tiwari, P. Singh
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What’s Bad: This film is a classic case of haphazard filmmaking. Jingoistic dialogues, untimely appearing songs and shoddy camerawork pull this film down.
Loo Break: Yes, please!
Watch or Not?: Shorgul is easily passable. This is a regressive film that one may watch to learn ‘What not to do when directing a film’.
User Rating:
Like most political dramas, the film is set in UP.
Shorgul revolves around, how every now and then, Indian politicians take refuge of the Hindu-Muslim rivalry for their vote-banks. In this story, an innocent friendship between a Hindu boy, Raghu (Aniruddh Dave) and a Muslim girl Zainab (Suha Gezen) becomes fuel for the local politicians to raise an issue.
It shows how politicians like Ranjit Om (Jimmy Shergill) and Alam Khan (Narendra Jha) infiltrate people’s minds with jingoistic thoughts, just to get support in elections and how their speeches affect the common yet influential lives of Salim (Hiten Tejwani) and his brother played by Eijaz Khan.
Also, how a handful of political figures such as Chaudhary (Ashutosh Rana) who believe in a humanitarian way are not tolerated well in society.
When the trailer of Shorgul was released, it seemed to be a highly vocal social drama, dealing with burning issues in UP such as beef ban and suppression of minorities. Unfortunately, the film gets stripped down to becoming just another drama with botched up plot that is confused between becoming hard-hitting and commercial.
Dialogues of Shorgul seem to have been inspired from all possible 80s films and are dramatic enough to give you a bad headache.
Majority of the dialogues are jingoistic and the mention of bigger issues such as Kashmir, Pakistan are hurled without any context every now and then. The writing is extremely careless and it is a shame that such provocative dialogues against communities are being used for mere drama quotient in a film.
The inclusion of a love story is obviously necessary for almost every Bollywood film and so why would Shorgul not have it. It would have been a smart decision had the makers stuck to a Hindu-Muslim, girl-boy friendship becoming a problem rather than a one sided love affair.
The film’s characters sure find inspiration from real-life politicians but it is only their names that sound familiar, such as Alam Khan’s character to Azam Khan and also Chief Minister Mithilesh seems to based on Akhilesh Yadav. Of course, it hardly makes any impact to the film thanks to the flat nature of this script.
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Jimmy Shergill as Ranjit Om is impressive enough. He puts life into a role that seems to be popular in every Prakash Jha film. It is of course sad that his acting talents are a complete waste for what the film is.
Ashutosh Rana is known to be a brilliant actor. He puts up a great act as Chaudhary but unfortunately, the makers do not want you to see him beyond his ‘Moustache’ that is jarringly irritating.
TV actors Hiten Tejwani, Eijaz Khan and Aniruddh Dave churn out average performances.
Newcomer, Suha Gezen who is a Sonakshi Sinha look alike over-acts in most of her scenes. She is either seen to be irritatingly chirpy or running around the riot-stricken streets in slo-mo crying buckets of water. Do I have to say anything further on her performance for this part?
Shorgul‘s direction is extremely amateurish and it is clearly seen in most of the frames. While certain scenes look long winding have been taken in one shot with literal camera-shifts from one character to another, there are others with hasty camera movements too.
One of the worst scenes captured in the film is where one character is stabbed on a bridge with an iron rod and instead of screaming or any reaction to the act, he is seen hurling dialogues like ‘Zainab Ka Khayal Rakhna’. For god-sake, even superheros would die with that hit but it seems this love-struck lad feels nothing!
Equally funny are the riot scenes where we just see hoards of people running around with swords and knives in their hands. Absolutely no seriousness here!
What can one say about the music, there is one song for the love story then a sad song for moping and rejection and of course a completely out of context item number. All of these make it extremely difficult for you to stay on your seat.
The background score is inserted wishfully and it rarely affects any of the scenes.
Editing for this film seemed to be a piece of cake. It looks like the editor was given a list of timelines where he has to cut and proceed. Who cares if it looks abrupt right?
Shorgul is a missed opportunity! The film is white noise with all possible cliches from a political drama clubbed with hard-hitting issues rolled into dramatic dialogues. I’d say in the words of Chaudhary, if ‘Insaniyat’ is your ‘Dharam’, give this film a miss! A 1.5/5 it is.
Shorgul releases on 1st July, 2016.
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