Review: OMERTA

Rajkummar Rao Ko Kitna Ragdoge?

2 stars

Mini Review:

The word ‘Omerta’ means a code of silence that members

of crime groups adopt when caught by the law. This film

shows us how Omar was happy to kill in the name of

religion. The staccato storytelling style and the constant

shift between past and present is distracting at best.

Unfortunately there is no emotional takeaway from the

story, so you watch the stabbings and the kidnappings

wondering ‘what was that?’

Main Review:

The film begins with Rajkummar Rao in a pub arm wrestling

contest with big ‘white’ men. Erm… No matter how much they

show Rajkummar Rao exercise, he’s no Sylvester Stallone.

But Hansal Mehta has given us critically acclaimed Shahid and

the fabulous Aligarh, so you stop scoffing and let the film take

you where it wants to go.

We see that he’s stalking tourists. And you grin at the

ridiculousness of a tourist playing chess with beer in hand.

Of course Omar plays chess and he drinks milk. For a terrorist

who wants to blend in, a little odd, no?

The events unfold on the screen like a listicle. He stalks and

kidnaps tourists, gets trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan,

kidnaps and butchers Daniel Pearl, and then orchestrates the

26 November attacks in India from a prison in Pakistan. Initially,

you are interested because the film offers us a sort of back

story: he’s is a prayerful Muslim lad dropped out from London

School Of Economics because he’s moved by the Muslim

deaths in Bosnia. But it is not a believable story at all. It feels

far fetched because there isn’t a direct emotional connect.

The terrorist in training who holds the photographs of his parents

before and after they were killed has more emotional connect

than just some guy who is moved to terrorism because people

are being killed in another part of the world. His dad seems so

rational, it makes no sense for the lad to be indoctrinated by

seeing photographs of dead people.

Perhaps the nature of indoctrination is that way. We see no

womenfolk in this ‘terrorist’ biopic. So for Omar to say, ‘You raped

my mother and my sisters’ seems silly almost. And if he’s so

‘intelligent’, why does he not realise kidnapping tourists in India

is just pointless exercise and not really jihad? And he loses focus

from Bosnia so easily and is happy because ‘people treat him well’

in Pakistan.

What the film misses out is showing us why he takes joy in the

killing. They use real news footage to make a point, where the

original Omar is shown smirking and smiling as he is arrested.

It would have made for an interesting psychological portrait had

we understood where the smirk comes from. Netflix show Narcos

on Pablo Escobar keeps you involved because we understand

how the mind of the man worked. Rajkummar Rao’s Omar is a flat

character. There are no redeeming qualities to him at all. Pablo

Escobar is supposed to have set fire to 2 million dollars once

because his daughter was cold. Here, Omar is rude to his wife

because she claims she is worried for him. It’s the only interaction

in the film where Omar is shown with his family. In the scenes

with his father, he just comes across as someone who needed

to be slapped by his ammi a couple of times when he was younger.     

The film is too disjointed by far to make any impact. In fact when

you see his rational father say that he’s innocent seems completely

out of character. Rajkummar Rao has worked very hard on his

British accent and even says ‘Innit’ rather well, but you wonder

why he speaks English in Pakistan in a Dhaba and to other locals,

and then gets enraged when other terrorists in training laugh at his

‘softness’. It’s a biopic, so watch it with a sense of detachment

and wonder why the film was made.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)