Hawaaizaada : Movie Review : Poorly written, badly acted and completely boring!

Movie: Hawaaizaada

Cast: Ayushmann Khurrana, Pallavi Shradha, Mithun Chakraborty

Director: Vibhu Puri

Plot:

The film is based on the life of scientist Shivkar Bapuji Talpade who is credited with having constructed India's first unmanned plane. The movie is set in Mumbai, 1895 and is a fictional take on the life of Mr. Talpade and the numerous obstacles that he faces before realizing his dream of flying the (hold your breath) first manned-airplane ever in the world. In between, the movie somehow attempts to be part-patriotic, part-tragic and part-romantic all at once. Does it work?

Script and Presentation:

Hawaaizaada wants to tread a fine line between a biography and a musical-romance-patriotic-tragedy, but it achieves nether of these traits and fall somewhere in between. The problem is that the movie seems unsure of what it wants to be. The script is very very poorly written, and the songs come one after the other with no end. There's an item song, a happy love song, a sad love song, a mourning song, a patriotic song, but every single song slows the flow of the movie rather than taking it forward. 

The thought of the scriptwriters should have been like this: The lead is a misfit in the society: 'lets write a song', the lead meets a girl: 'why not another song', the lead gets thrown out of home: 'a sad song', the lead and his tutor set out to make a plane: 'a motivational song', the girl ditches the lead: 'for God's sake another song'. The truth is, I have covered only less than half the movie here. If the makers had put half the effort that they did in placing songs in different situations of the movie into delivering a better script and making a plot that makes sense, the movie could have at least been watchable.

Performances:

The acting is just passable and even the lead pair look very mechanical in their reactions to situations. Ayushamann Khurrana looks like he's about to fall asleep most of the times like the audience who get to watch this movie on screen and on the times that he does become active, he does the randomest stupid things like plucking out the tooth of a Britisher, becoming a traitor to his guru and even becomes Superman by flying out of a ship on top of the sea.

And Pallavi Shradha, for every ounce of beauty that God has bestowed on her, I wish He had also added a couple of grams of expressions on her face. She does have a range of scenes to emote but she just turns out a few staple expressions, that you can count with your fingers the different ways that she emotes. The only saving grace is Mithun Chakraborty, whom as Subbaraya Shastry, is the most 'normal' character in the movie. His quirks are laughable and he at least has a purpose in his life unlike everyone else in the movie who seem to be wandering around without knowing why they are there.

Positives:

Mithun Chakraborty shines in his role as a vedic-scientist who is searching for the right ingredients to make a modern flight using the concepts explained in the Vedas that were used to build the Pushpak Vimanas. As preposterous as that may sound, it is made believable to an extent largely due to the performance of Chakraborty as Subbaraya.

The set pieces are beautiful and kind of remind you of the setting of Sherlock Holmes movies. Only if they could have made someone act in there!

A couple of songs are hum worthy (okay, if you have 14 or 15 in a movie, at least a couple ought to be!) and even though you may not like the movie, you would be humming a few tunes after you exit the theatre.

Negatives:

The entire script is a big let down. The movie does not establish if it is a documentary or a pseudo-documentary or an inspired drama or what it is and leaves the viewer confused since the movie is said to be 'inspired from true accounts'. How much is true? What is false? Someone care to bother?

The acting is lazy, That's what it is. You can't blame the actors though. There's a lot of senseless situations in the movie and with not much to act for, they probably didn't know what to do.

The unrelenting parade of songs that gets you irritated after a point.

Verdict:

The worst part of the movie is the lack of historical evidence behind what it claims was achieved and the absolute lack of clarity in explaining why this part of history was totally forgotten or wiped off. What did the genius Mr. Talpade do after becoming the first human to fly a plane? Why did he not try to manufacture more planes, use his technology to fight the British? Nope, nothing!  A movie made with such beautiful set pieces should have also given some respect to the back story and the script. Hawaiizaada is a movie you can miss. You won't regret it.

Our Rating: 2.5/5