MOVIE REVIEW : KARZZ

KARZZ : Misplaced blame.

Where ever you will read about the latest re-make movie Karzz, they all will be echoing the same voice in the same baritone, echoing Himesh bashing. “Himesh does not know how to act, why does he act, why can’t he dress well ……”, so on.

However are we not missing a point here?
Whenever any movie does well, irrespective of the actors it has, it is said that the director has done a commendable job and if a movie does poorly, the blame again goes to the director. So why on earth is everyone bashing the actor Himesh for the poor movie Karzz is. Why is no one talking about Satish Kaushik. Why this misplaced blame ??

No doubt, Himesh does not have any acting talent. However that is not the real low point for Karzz. I think it is a much more badly made movie that a badly acted movie. Satish Kaushik has attempted to do a humongous task of remaking Subash Ghai’s Karz and it is not an easy task to do. We know what happened to Ram Gopal Verma, when he tried to do the same with Sholay, that too when Ramu has a great track record as a director. Satish on the contrary has a handicap that he does not have any good movie to his name. 9 out of the 10 movies made by him were Flops, with the exception of “Teray Naam” which was a hit, but I am not sure can be categorized as a good movie.

So what actually is wrong with Karzz. First of all, Satish Kaushik is not sure whether we wants to treat the movie differently than the original one or wants to make a scene by scene copy. He starts with making a different movie, and remains like that for two thirds of the time and that is the biggest problem of Karzz. One cannot avoid making comparison with the original, however even if one does not do that, Karzz is a below average movie. There seems to be no flow between scenes. The dialogs are clichéd and come from the era of 80s. And like many 80s movie there seems to be no effort done in making a good script. There is no effort to build characters and you can hardly relate to any of them. Himesh as Ravi Verma seems to be so comfortable with his reincarnated self, you never see any emotions which depict his anxiety. His female lead Shweta Kumar is also so cool about it. She remains so expression less, when she gets to know about the reincarnation. Raj Babbar playing the character of Pinchoo Kapu and Danny playing the character of Pran from the original are reduced to nothing but comic caricatures. The only saving grace of all the actors is Urmilla, who has given a nice performance and carried her character with a lot of grace.

Somewhere in the middle of the second half, Satish kaushik seems to realize that he could no longer handle the “different” treatment of the movie and starts the scene by scene copy of the original. And this actually comes as a big relief since one starts relating and remembering the original classic where Rishi kapoor had done a great job of delivering those powerful dialogues in the climax. Satish Kaushik however loses the track of his own script and fails to make a link between the “different” part and the “copied” part of the movie. For example, in the final climax scene between Himesh and Urmilla (after the Ek Hasina Thi song), Urmilla’s dialogs are the same as in the original but they are not coherent with the flow of re-make, where she already knows the reincarnation story.

And in between all this bad acting and bad direction, comes the ear piercing nasal renditions. Himesh is a very good music director. However we has been butchering his music by singing and now he is further butchering it by acting in them.

One thing is clear, Satisk Kaushik cannot make a good movie. He has no control on the flow of the movie. He does not understand the need of a good and a meaningful script and has no idea of what it means to build characters.

All in all, Karzz is a very "rich" poor movie, since the production quality is world class and the locales are exotic but in terms of contents, it has literally nothing.

Ameet Mattoo
New Delhi.