Movie Review: Wajah Tum Ho

First published on Follo.in

More often than not good stories are killed by badly written screenplays. Wajah Tum Ho is not one of those cases. This is a more collaborative piece of work. One of the biggest contributors to the tragedy that this film turns out to be is the dialogue writer, Rashmi Virag. Apart from writing punchlines that evoke laughter, her English lines are so full of grammatical errors that the film makes you laugh all through. One of the words used by Sana Khan, who plays a hotshot lawyer educated in the US, is ‘logicless”.

This interestingly could help us sum the film effectively. The film is a joke at best, one which should make you roll with laughter. And if you do not have an appetite for humour emanating from badly done work, Wajah Tum Ho is just not for you.

The premise of Wajah Tum Ho is not bad. It’s a classic revenge story, presented as a suspense-drama. A few men do something wrong some years back and it is back to haunt them in the present. A police officer is murdered on live television after the killer hacks the ‘IP address’ that is sending the TV channels signals to its servers. The killings are repeated as an honest police officer tries to solve the case, which he refers to as ‘pyaaz’ due to the layers it has.

The idea is not bad, really. The execution is, however, a possible case study on how to mess things up. Numerous badly shot remixed songs are put in to lure the audience who wishes for sleaze on the big screen. The collaborative effort includes forgettable performances by the actors. Sharman Joshi, an actor who has done far more memorable works, manages to put in some consistency in his act. Rajniesh Duggall has some moments of good in an otherwise not so good act. Sana Khan manages to look nice to her and the director’s credit. Gurmeet Choudhary seems to have concentrated more on his pout than his dialogue delivery.

The direction is consistently poor. Vishal Pandya, who had started off years back with a decent but forgotten Three, seems to be guided more by certain box office guidelines than sensibility. There is hardly any room for creativity. He does not even work towards finding a new name for his police inspector. He uses the convenient ‘Gaitonde’, because Mumbai Police always has one ‘Inspector Gaitonde’ in every station.

Early in the film, they show reporters doing piece-to-cameras outside a police station where a media mogul, played by Rajniesh, has been summoned for questioning. One reporter says that he is “clueless” on what is happening inside the station as the police have refused to give out any details. Let me borrow his expression. We are as ‘clueless’ as to why such ‘logicless’ films get made. Maybe just to recycle old songs and help the producers make money on them again. Maybe! Works well for everyone associated with the film.