Take a city, add bombastic dialogs, add lots of green, and you get a Sanjay Gupta Film. Take the recipe, add an actress who had a hiatus of at least 5 years, and you get Jazbaa. Had it been 7 years, you would have got Jazbaaa, 8 then Jazzbaaa, 9 then Jjazzbaaa, and so on, but that's not the issue here.
After showing the audience that she is fit and fine to come back to the screen by running through Marine Drive, Bachchan starts portraying the roles of a criminal lawyer, a marathon sprinter, a helicopter mom, and a Gold medalist screamer. Boy, she can scream anywhere, anytime, and at anybody. Suddenly, her school-going daughter is kidnapped by a tech-savvy abductor-cum-hacker-cum-righteous mamzer who demands that she fight the case of a convicted drug dealer and let him walk free.
To our surprise, she agrees to pay the unique ransom, and helping her in her child-saving mission is her childhood friend (really?), rustily played by Khan who is himself fighting an alleged graft case for heck's sake. What follows is neither new to our thriller senses nor is novel by any of its look-good approaches.
Throwing green and more green at you just because it's your signature style does not work anymore. We have reached Mars, for god's sakes. Apart from those delivered by Khan, all the dialogs are preposterous. Do you think you would scream "Where are you?" to a kidnapper who has just abducted your baby? Mr. Gupta does.
Mrs. Bachchan's performance is particularly cringe-worthy as she moves here and there with a dead stare in her eyes and a lion's roar for a throat. Reacting throughout the film like you hate everybody is not the appropriate type of characterization that one adds into a story whose climax is more apparent than the actors' ages. The protagonist plays a lawyer who only defends known, guilty offenders because, she claims, "those who are not guilty cannot afford her." With this attitude, I had Arybhatta's greatest invention of cares to give.
The screenplay is a hot mess. Trying to slip in few songs between a thriller film is the lowest thing Gupta has done for Jazbaa. There's even a hip hop song by Badshah somewhere which had great similarities with his number in Khoobsurat. It reminded me of its actress and I was done for the day.
Courtroom sequences are nicely carved jokes here, where the judge is sleeping and the advocates themselves reaching a verdict, even making few educated guesses in front of him; it was unintentional humor. They are so bad that just these sequences can be tried in a real court for perjury. There's also a touch of activism, for cryin' out loud.
I am all for woman-centric films, but churning out rubbish in the name of thrills and hiring an actress with a huge fandom and telling an ordinary story will be received the same way how other recent films are received in Bollywood, irrespective of the genre. Shroff and Azmi did a good job.
BOTTOM LINE: Sanjay Gupta's Jazbaa is maybe made for the modern world where every other person is a thug, but after analysis, it just looks like green beef.
GRADE: D-
Can be watched with a typical Indian family? YES
After showing the audience that she is fit and fine to come back to the screen by running through Marine Drive, Bachchan starts portraying the roles of a criminal lawyer, a marathon sprinter, a helicopter mom, and a Gold medalist screamer. Boy, she can scream anywhere, anytime, and at anybody. Suddenly, her school-going daughter is kidnapped by a tech-savvy abductor-cum-hacker-cum-righteous mamzer who demands that she fight the case of a convicted drug dealer and let him walk free.
To our surprise, she agrees to pay the unique ransom, and helping her in her child-saving mission is her childhood friend (really?), rustily played by Khan who is himself fighting an alleged graft case for heck's sake. What follows is neither new to our thriller senses nor is novel by any of its look-good approaches.
Throwing green and more green at you just because it's your signature style does not work anymore. We have reached Mars, for god's sakes. Apart from those delivered by Khan, all the dialogs are preposterous. Do you think you would scream "Where are you?" to a kidnapper who has just abducted your baby? Mr. Gupta does.
Mrs. Bachchan's performance is particularly cringe-worthy as she moves here and there with a dead stare in her eyes and a lion's roar for a throat. Reacting throughout the film like you hate everybody is not the appropriate type of characterization that one adds into a story whose climax is more apparent than the actors' ages. The protagonist plays a lawyer who only defends known, guilty offenders because, she claims, "those who are not guilty cannot afford her." With this attitude, I had Arybhatta's greatest invention of cares to give.
The screenplay is a hot mess. Trying to slip in few songs between a thriller film is the lowest thing Gupta has done for Jazbaa. There's even a hip hop song by Badshah somewhere which had great similarities with his number in Khoobsurat. It reminded me of its actress and I was done for the day.
Courtroom sequences are nicely carved jokes here, where the judge is sleeping and the advocates themselves reaching a verdict, even making few educated guesses in front of him; it was unintentional humor. They are so bad that just these sequences can be tried in a real court for perjury. There's also a touch of activism, for cryin' out loud.
I am all for woman-centric films, but churning out rubbish in the name of thrills and hiring an actress with a huge fandom and telling an ordinary story will be received the same way how other recent films are received in Bollywood, irrespective of the genre. Shroff and Azmi did a good job.
BOTTOM LINE: Sanjay Gupta's Jazbaa is maybe made for the modern world where every other person is a thug, but after analysis, it just looks like green beef.
GRADE: D-
Can be watched with a typical Indian family? YES