When one tries to better excellence in their work, they often fail, take for example Christopher Nolan, who delivered quality in Batman Begins, excellence in The Dark Knight, and falters miserably in The Dark Knight Rises. Vishal Bhardwaj is one such movie maker from India who we are collectively proud of, in terms of the quality of cinema that he produces. His movies can easily be compared to a dark night of winters with background music provided by thunderstorm. Usually, either his characters are dark in their thoughts or the story is too dark or both, and it is carried beautifully forward by poetic dialogs and intricate relationships of those dark characters. Maqbool was pure brilliance, and adaptation of Othello in Omkara was excellence, but Haider (adapted from Hamlet) falters miserably showing signs of brilliance intermittently as if trying to justify the existence of the whole movie in those few moments. Where Haider fails is that it tries to deliver a message, a bit too strongly i would say, which was not the case with Maqbool or Omkara. When you try to make a movie close to reality, you often fail in fictionalizing its story and cease to take liberty in delivering a cohesive story. The message for me takes to much of time in the movie so that Mr. Bhardwaj was not able to fully form his characters. For example: Haider, (BTW Shahid acted brilliantly): Director was not convincing in terms of forming the reasons as to how much Haider truly loved his father and mother (in a sexual way, which is the pretext of Hamlet), or how could he eventually end up being mad which further befalls his characteristic of indecision to kill his uncle. In the original play, Confusion was the central theme of the protagonist, however, Haider was not able to establish strongly why he was confused, or whether he was really so confused about things. Compare it to Langda Tyagi in Omkara, he had all the reasons to hate Omkara, which were very well established and brilliantly portrayed by Saif Ali Khan (easily his life's best act). Langda Tyagi was as convincing as anything you can imagine but not Haider.
Ghazala Meer (again Tabu here was pretty awesome): The focus could have been easily distributed amongst these 2 characters of Mother and Son, as Director did with Langda Tyagi and Omkara, however, by adding such strong actors as Irrfan Khan and KK, you are bound to look at them, appreciate them, and eventually lose focus from the central characters.
Best Scenes comparison with Omkara:
The recitation of Armed Forces Special Act by Haider: This was a brilliant scene, well acted and well edited, and frankly there is no scene like this in Omkara. Hats off.
The Skull scene at Graveyard by Haider vs The mirror breaking scene of Langda Tyagi: The graveyard scene could have been the pivotal scene of the movie Haider, however, the unnecessary humor kills it as opposed to a few strong dialogs and the show-of-strength of the color red in the mirror scene in Omkara.
As said earlier and throughout, it was supposed to exceed Omkara in brilliance, form a strong story around even stronger characters, but it was not able to convince me for any of its strong performances. It was a disappointment.
Chutzpah was repeated several times in the movie, and eventually I felt like it, where the promise was the audacity and the deliverance led to disappointment.
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