Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Emraan Hashmi has a brooding charm about himself, even when he isn’t playing the same man on screen. He looks intense, carries an air of permanent emotional damage, and, as Awarapan 2 rolls on, you realise he is perfectly aware of that quality too. The film exists in the same familiar universe – a man searching for a new purpose, fighting the demons of his past, an unlikely bond, a twist of fate and a whole lot of action. If that isn’t a fairly accurate description of what a full-fledged Emraan Hashmi film looks like, then what is?
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Awarapan 2, while exploring a familiar premise, takes the story outside India. This time, Hashmi’s Shivam Pandit travels to Bangkok to rescue a little girl from human trafficking. The girl, whom he had raised, is kidnapped from an orphanage, giving Pandit a new purpose in life and, more importantly, a reason to return to the life he always belonged to: a dark world where lies, violence and despair dictate the rules.
Pandit, somewhere on the way to his destiny, finds emotional support in Disha Patani‘s Zara, a trained chello player born into a gangster family and carrying her own share of ghosts from the past.
The story, honestly, isn’t something you haven’t seen or heard before. But it sets up the perfect conflict for its hero to emerge. For Pandit, rescuing a little girl from trafficking is almost too perfectly designed a push to become the man everyone is waiting to cheer for. Awarapan 2 doesn’t waste much time bringing Hashmi back to doing what he does best. And once he arrives, there is very little stopping him.
Hashmi carries the film on his shoulders, right from the first scene. This is his playing field, and nobody, not even some of the best actors of this generation, can quite pull off this particular brand of brooding, wounded masculinity the way he does. Awarapan 2 is, in many ways, a reminder that you simply cannot deny Emraan Hashmi once he decides to take over the screen.
And this is exactly why the film works better when it stops trying to be clever and lets Hashmi be Hashmi.
Director Nitin Kakkar knows that this is a perfect recipe for Hashmi’s fans. The look, the attitude, the silences, the action, the tortured eyes – it is all there. You don’t need much convincing to embrace Pandit because Hashmi has been playing versions of this man for years. Only this time, the film knows exactly what the audience has come to see.
Disha Patani? Well…
While Hashmi’s Pandit holds the fort, almost nobody and nothing comes close to him. Patani carries her own wager – ‘cast me only if you are fine with an actor incapable of giving any expressions whatsoever’. She looks pretty. Beat that. She looks hot, as she always does. But that’s about it.
Zara has layers. She has a past, a family history, emotional baggage and an arc that could have actually added something substantial to the film. Instead, it almost feels as though the writer’s ambitions for the character disappeared the moment they realised Disha was going to play her. The writers are Bilal Siddiqui, Sanjay Masoomm and producer Vishesh Bhatt.
Disha walks alongside Pandit and you don’t care for them. She holds his hand and you feel nothing. She tells him she’s with him, and you don’t cheer for them. Zara is perpetually in a state of emotional trance, carrying the pain of a lost family. But even in the scenes where she is supposed to forget that pain and simply embrace the man in front of her, her face continues to scream the same pain.
So do we.
Watching her expressionless face eventually becomes a pain thesis of its own. Patani sticks out like the biggest sore thumb in a film where it isn’t particularly difficult to find other problems. And that leaves Hashmi with an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting to do.
The strange part is that the film actually creates enough space for Pandit and Zara to share a little more passion. Given the legacy of Awarapan and Hashmi’s place in Hindi cinema’s romance-with-a-side-of-doom universe, one genuinely passionate kiss between the two would hardly have felt out of place. In fact, it could have seamlessly honoured the brand without becoming a gratuitous addition. Instead, their romance remains oddly restrained, leaving you wondering why a film so committed to everything else stops just when the chemistry needs to catch fire.
The villains don’t exactly help. The problem is that they aren’t menacing enough either.
Puran Gabbi’s Zorawar, the primary antagonist, feels like a man you don’t need much strength to defeat. He doesn’t just look physically incapable of taking on a well-ripped Hashmi but also lacks the emotional menace required to make Pandit’s battle feel genuinely dangerous.
For a franchise that once had Ashutosh Rana’s stylish, dangerous and almost careless antagonist, Gabbi neither serves nor complements the world of Awarapan. Zorawar is supposed to make you worry about Pandit. Instead, you spend much of the time wondering when Pandit is going to finish the job.
Ironically, it is the man standing next to him who understands the assignment better. As Jaideep, Zorawar’s henchman, Suvinder Vicky knows precisely how much to deliver and when. He isn’t trying to steal scenes, and that is why he works. There is a quiet believability to him, and Vicky brings enough tension without constantly announcing that he is the villain.
And then there is Shabana Azmi – the most wronged person in Awarapan 2. The trailer and promotional material sold Azmi’s Nafisa as one of the film’s major threats. You go in expecting her to be this formidable presence, someone who will fundamentally alter Pandit’s journey. Then the film starts, and… where is she?
Azmi has hardly anything to do.
Nafisa has no meaningful arc, very little weightage and barely enough space to establish herself as the formidable force the film’s marketing promised. The film keeps trying to tell you that she is important, but the screenplay never really demonstrates why. At one point, you genuinely forget she is even in the film.
That is quite an achievement when you’ve cast Shabana Azmi as your antagonist. One scene between Azmi and Disha especially hurts – quite deeply, because you can see, almost painfully, the mismatch in talent. Watching a woman of Azmi’s calibre share a dialogue with Disha is like a reminder of just how much the film has wasted.
If there is one department where Awarapan 2 understands the assignment beautifully, it is the music. The new songs work well enough, but it is the old Awarapan tracks that give the film its biggest emotional advantage. The makers clearly know that they are sitting on a nostalgia goldmine, and, thankfully, they don’t misuse it.
The familiar songs are placed at moments designed to trigger memory rather than merely remind you that the original had good music. Nostalgia works because it isn’t treated like a desperate callback. It becomes part of the mood of the film.
The sequence in which Pandit is surrounded by monks, with Tera Mera Rishta playing in the background, is particularly whistle-worthy. It is the moment where the film briefly stops worrying about whether the plot is making perfect sense and simply understands what the audience wants to feel. And isn’t that enough for an Emraan Hashmi film?
So, does Awarapan 2 work?
The biggest irony of Awarapan 2 is that it has almost everything you would expect from a film like this – an intense hero, a tragic past, violence, romance, betrayal, human trafficking, gangsters, a child in danger, a complicated woman, a forgettable villain and a soundtrack that knows exactly when to make you nostalgic. Yet, it doesn’t always know what to do with all of it.
The screenplay follows a fairly predictable path, and several characters feel underwritten. The villains don’t create enough danger, the romance doesn’t create enough emotion and some of the dramatic beats arrive with the subtlety of a truck crashing through a wall.
But then Hashmi appears. And suddenly, you remember why Awarapan became what it did.
Pandit is not a particularly complicated character. He is a man with a past, a wound, a purpose and a very specific idea of justice. But Hashmi gives him the kind of wounded intensity that makes even familiar material feel watchable. He doesn’t need to explain the pain. He carries it.
Awarapan 2 understands that Emraan Hashmi himself is the nostalgia.
The film wants to be a mass action drama, a romantic tragedy, a revenge story and a spiritual journey at the same time. It doesn’t always balance these identities successfully. But when it puts Hashmi at the centre and lets him brood, fight, love, suffer and eventually explode, it finds its rhythm.
Awarapan gave Hashmi a man willing to do anything for love. Awarapan 2 takes that same passion and turns the volume up – this time making him a full-fledged mass hero. And you know what? It all suits him.
The film may not reinvent the wheel. It barely tries to. But it knows its audience, knows its star and, most importantly, knows that there is still something deeply satisfying about watching Emraan Hashmi walk into a room looking like he has lost everything, only to remind everyone why they should be afraid of him.
For the Emraan Hashmi fans, Awarapan 2 is less a sequel and more a reunion. You see, some actors play the genre but Emraan? He makes you remember that he is the genre.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
