Review: IRADA

Irada Nek Hai, Focus Nahi Hai! Result? Shambles!

1 star

Mini Review:  

It starts out as a corporation polluting the ground water and water in the canals and a father investigating his daughter’s wrongful death. The film rapidly deteriorates when the stars begin to showboat. The movie then goes on to fall down in a pile of shambles.

Main Review:

Curiously, a film about a big corporation bribing political leaders (the state chief minister nothing less) being released during the elections in the state should have raised eyebrows. Alas, the content is so shoddy that this film will be forgotten soon after release.

So Naseeruddin Shah is a dad whose daughter dies of cancer because she swims in the canal with polluted waters. When there is a series of blasts at the factory owned by the corporation owned by an obviously bad guy called Paddy (Sharad Kelkar) Arshad Warsi shows up as the cop who is investigating the blasts.

Good thing about the film is Divya Dutta. She plays the crooked, foul mouthed politician so well, you want to make a movie based on just her back story! She munches her food loudly, her mother accuses her of having murdered her father, and like a seasoned politician, even when she’s beat, she turns the situation to her own advantage.

There's the ridiculous character of a journalist girlfriend of an RTI activist (Sagarika Ghatge) who  who behaves in the most illogical manner: she doesn't know if Arshad Warsi is good cop or a crooked one, and she hands over all the evidence her boyfriend died collecting to the man after practising,’Hello, i have evidence to support your case…’ She also is under threat by Paddy’s goons, but she jogs at night! She’s a journalist under threat and a strange package arrives at her home, and instead of taking it to the police or the bomb squad, she opens the package and when seeing a half filled bottle labelled beauty product, she dumps the hissing liquid into the sink. Wow!

Arshad Warsi and Naseeruddin Shah trade poetry over single malt, and each poem is supposed to be a clue. Seriously though, you're past caring. And Bollywood should stop borrowing these situation softboards with threads linking people and places. The female journalist sees the board (presumably Arshad Warsi has been working on it), and happily solves the mystery of the factory blasts.

There's more confusion in the story when the cancer patient wife of a man who carried out the blasts tells Arshad Warsi about a ‘Cancer Train’. In reality if such a train exists, then it is a horrible thing, but the train does nothing to link Naseeruddin Shah with the factory blasts. The story is in shambles. The cancer train is meant to shock the audience but you shrug your shoulders and wonder why it is a part of ‘this’ film. The end is so tedious you have checked your phone messages and replied to email.

Perhaps had they stuck to telling about groundwater contamination story like Erin Brockovich this movie may have meant something. But with factory blasts being made on the home compute by someone who did not finish their photoshop class, this film ends up being a waste of time.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)

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