Ishaqzaade – The run to get vanquished!

The first thing that strikes you 15 minutes into Ishaqzaade is the fact that there are no known faces. The only familiar face is Parineeti Chopra and she is one movie old, that too, not in the lead role. The movie isn’t produced by Anurag Kashyap in which case you’d understand the lack of known faces in the cast because he openly declares his budgets are paper thin. So Yash Raj productions come out with a movie out of Aditya Chopra’s pocket money.
The second most important question is “Who is Habib Faisal?”. This question is not quite like “Who is John Galt?” but Habib Faisal, it turns out, has been in the reckoning of Yash Raj movies for a bit. He is the screenwriter and director of Do Dhooni Char. Excuse my impudence if you already knew this fact but also question yourself what the hell were you doing watching this movie? He has co-written and written Salaam Namaste and Jhoom barabar jhoom respectively. Something notable is that he wrote Band Baaja Baraat. Apart from that weak plots seem to be his specialty.

So Habib Faisal brings out a movie set in rural UP which is a political struggle between 2 families for the MLA’s seat. The struggle is between the Chauhans and the Qureshis leaving nothing in common and everything to fight for between the two families. As expected there are kids in both families. They fight tooth and nail as kids and as fate would have it fall in love under strange and, in this case, bitter circumstances. The storyline is one-dimensional and flat. It takes turns as expected and the turns are dealt with expectedly except on one or two occasions. The end brings the culmination of the movie as not something that takes it to the highest point but as a bitter end leaving an insipid tale even more uninspiring.

What Habib has done really well in the movie is maintaining a consistency. The dialogues, the scenes and the setting of the story are very congruent. They all complement each other adding strength to the story and the characters. The characters are not some that you will encounter in daily life but the scenes make them believable. Debutant Arjun Kapoor does a fine job. He looks every bit a ruffian and even though he fell woefully short during emotional scenes he still carried the movie very well. Great debut when compared to the likes of Imran Khan. Parineeti Chopra is by far the director’s biggest investment and somewhere I think he hoped she’d do an Anushka in Band Baaja Baraat and carry the movie singlehandedly. It turns out that in this story she alone wouldn’t be enough as the story required better performances from the little known side cast. She is lively and is surely someone to watch for in the future. It would do her a great deal of good if she sheds this tom-boy image in her next movie else she will get type casted to very limited roles. Apart from her Gauahar Khan does a decent job in her limited scope and nothing else is mentionable.

There is barely any comedy and the movie features running and chasing mostly. Bullets are fired left right and center never hitting targets. The lead pair seems to be running from everything ultimately to meet an end that was inevitable and could easily be available had they only stopped running. The audience leaves the halls with a vague feeling as to what was the point of the movie. Having said that if you are someone who enjoys a good debut and a sprightly heroine who does some really good macho scenes you may find the movie enjoyable, atleast parts of it. Overall, Ishaqzaade is an average movie which does very little to stir our imaginations.