Reasons for boycotting ADHM

This is my first attempt at writing a film review and the objective is to caution those who are going being driven to theaters by popular print and electronic media reviews, to beg to reconsider.

For a film releasing on Diwali, when families are expected in theaters, it has a shoddy beginning as they show the two main actors getting engaged in a post-disco drunk sex scene. The two main actors who seem to have nothing more to do through the first half of the film except to go to discos, drink liquor, travel in private jets, live in hotel rooms – all with their parents’ wealth (who are funnily missing in the whole film) – begs the question, what is the film’s message?

The film is set in London (for the most part) and Vienna, Paris and Lucknow for the reminder bit but it is almost impossible to find this out for neither do you see the Westminster Abbey or the Eiffel Tower, but crowded discotheques with drunk and drugged people engaged in sexual reverie. It is only when the main actors of the film are seen in an underground metro station that you realize the location.

The role of Sabaa (Aishwarya Rai), supposedly a poet, is baffling and one tends to think that the heavily made up actress is brought in only as a glamour quotient to pep up the second half of the film, even the tears rolling down her cheeks appearing to be like glycerin. The role of Shah Rukh Khan in the film is beyond my comprehension.

Homes are lavish, set in Europe, pubs, discos, drinking, white skin and sex is all that is seen unabashedly throughout the film, which if anything, will raise the subconscious aspirations of the middle class audience. There is no connection – to reality, as I know it in India - or with emotion, as it should in a romantic film.  At the end, I was beginning to wonder what I was watching?

The dedication to the Army makes me laugh. What has this movie got to do with the soldiers who lost their lives on the border? Despite deliberate attempts, the film fails to depict a love story. The humor, with Lisa Hayden, is pathetic and best skipped. How the film received a U/A permit is beyond me!

But why the hype or overhype? Why didn’t MNS or Shiv Sena, the custodians of Indian culture, talk about the grossness of the movie rather than talk about Fawad Khan, who played such an insignificant bit.

Imaginatively hopeless storyline, thougtless dialogues and actions, a terrible waste of national resources – lots of reasons not to watch this film, least of which is Fawad Khan.