Movie Review: Haider..well made but long drawn

 Length or movie runtime is a crucial element. Keep it too short and you can’t get the audience to connect with your characters and the story development. Stretch it too long however, and you lose the audience’s interest despite having a good story to tell. That is principally the issue when you settle in to watch a movie like Haider, which would otherwise have been a very well made movie

Two hours and forty two minutes – enough to put a doubt in anyone’s mind. However, with the panache of Vishal Bhardwaj and a high quality cast of characters, one still soldiered on to witness this adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the beautiful valleys and snow capped façade of Kashmir.

The first half of the movie is slow but the build up is nice. Some of the directorial sparks like when Shahid’s character returns and his response of utter denial are great to watch. Coupled with that, the writing has some real gems for dialogues and the grim scenery is so well captured that you get involved, if not deeply so. The undertones and background score remind you of Kamineyy and especially the snazzy touch at the time of intermission has you all excited for bigger things to unravel in the second half.

Unfortunately, little of that ever ends up happening. Once the movie is over you actually wonder whether this was itself the ‘chutzpah’ of a kind that the movie so famously brandishes and the joke’s really on you. Don’t get me wrong, this movie is miles ahead of Matru ki bijlee and definitely picks up where Maqbool left off. Despite being an adaptation, Bhardwaj throws in quite a few instances that make you wonder if there are any twists to the adaptation itself. Nice touch, but at the end of it all it’s the length of the movie that does it in. Not helping matters, there are some disjointed sequences and what flowed earlier in one smooth harmonic motion, now seems to have lost the plot and is wandering aimlessly looking for some direction.

The starcast makes a valiant effort – Tabu playing the highly complicated character she always does in these movies with all her skill and Shahid maintaining great screen presence if a tad unconvincing in the longer dialogues and emotional affairs and the trustworthy KK Menon notching up another feather in his illustrious cap. Shraddha Kapoor’s presence is limited as unfortunately is the case with with Irrfan Khan who seems to have a dynamic character but perhaps made for another movie – given all the screen-time its been given.

Perhaps, some of the fault for how it all plays out lies in the original tale, with Shakespeare tragedies all having weak heroes. Whatever the case, such as it is, despite the performances, great writing and mostly good direction - the tale fails to engage beyond a point and you are left just counting the minutes till its really all over.