
A friend from Twitter listed A Wednesday as one of his favourite Bollywood movies, so I figured I’d give it a try, hoping to see it change my impression of the industry. I don’t think it did much in that regard.
It’s the sort of Bollywood movie that tries to portray itself as better than it actually is. It’s the kind of movie that bores you throughout and then adds an uplifting speech at the end to make it all seem worthwhile. It’s the kind of movie that most moviegoers feel the need to respect and like even though they may not actually have enjoyed it much.
I, for one, do not feel that need.
If everything else in this movie was stellar, I could have forgiven the absurd cinematography, but the rest of it wasn’t good enough to make up for it. There are at least twenty shots, totalling up to over two minutes of screen time (not all at once though), where the camera makes sweeping pans around the roof to show Naseeruddin Shah sitting, standing or roaming on the terrace in a pensive mood.
It’s almost as if it’s the first time the cameraman has discovered that a camera can be mounted on a crane and manipulated that way and wants to shove the effect in our face every five minutes. It’s like those people who buy iPhones just to show them off and have to fish them out of their pocket at the slightest opportunity. It’s annoying and immature. The score is horrible too, specially in the scenes described above.
It has absolutely no sense of pacing at all. This could have been a 40-minute TV episode and it would not have needed to sacrifice one bit of the plot.
The movie glorifies torture and police brutality and makes it look cool. Were we supposed to like Jimmy Shergill’s character and applaud the way he beat up criminals and took the law into his own hands? What if he beat someone up and it turned out that he was actually innocent? The movie does not address that.
For a serious movie, the subject of torture is not something you can use for comic effect and then brush under the carpet. The writers and directors of this movie have typical knee-jerk reactions to corruption and terrorism in India and they think their ill thought out solutions are the best ways to fix these problems. Clearly, they are not.
And the much ballyhooed monologue at the end, which seems to be the entire reason why people like this movie, was not great either. The sentiment was right but the dialogue was pedestrian and Naseeruddin Shah did not do a particularly good job of injecting the ordinary man’s plight into it.
The movie made great promises but failed to deliver on them. The only good thing I can say about it is that the acting was better than average, and that is indeed commendable, but I still wish I hadn’t seen this movie.
I’d rate it 2.5/5.





