A Disaster of Mughal Proportions

Jodhaa-Akbar. Three and half hours of my life I'll never get back.

Where do I begin? This movie was disappointing from its opening scene to the eventually desperately-awaited final credits. I had little expectations of this film to begin with, but even those were blown to pieces.

In summary, Jodhaa-Akbar was tediously slow, poorly written and directed, and badly performed.

Not to mention, the music was totally horrendous - what the hell was that Khawaja song supposed to be? If was the most un-Sufi song I've ever heard and the lyrics were terrible. Does no one know that Sufis spend less time glorifying the pirs and focus more on glorifying Allah (swt) by expressing their deep love and devotion to Him? This song was a complete joke. "Khawaja mere Khawaja, dil mein samaja"? I almost yelled out "Issay forward karo!".

Seriously, we spent half the movie laughing at the supposedly deep and serious scenes because it was all so campy. The Khawaja song in point - I've never seen such fake entranced whirling dervishes in my life. Sadly, except for Jashn-e-Bahara, the songs were painful to endure.

Anyway, back to the film. Frankly, Ashutosh Gowariker hasn't been able to deliver anything the size of Lagaan despite multiple attempts and I think he should just stop trying. He was clearly trying to make a Mughal-e-Azam style epic, but seems to have forgotten that the original took 10 years to make, was poetry personified, and had some of the finest actors of our time in it - not popcorn heroes and heroines who think they're deep and can speak Urdu because they can pronounce the Qaaf and pretend-sword-fight badly.

The film wandered aimlessly for two hours, unable to decide if it was a war movie/historical epic, or romantic love story. Gowariker eventually decided to cram 7 different and extremely slow-moving plot lines into two hours, throw in an intermission at a completely uninteresting point, and then resolve them in a rapid and confusing manner during the last 1.5 hours. The film feels like it was written by multiple people who couldn't decide the focus for the narrative. It could easily have been streamlined and made at least an hour shorter.

The battle scenes were exhausting and unnecessary. One got the sense that Gowariker wanted everything to look dramatic, imposing, heart-stopping. But you just couldn't feel the love. Maybe its all been done before, or maybe it just wasn't done well enough. The plot and characters were just not captivating enough for you to care about the outcome of the bloodshed. Because essentially everyone already knows what's going to happen (of course Akbar survives all these hamlay in his youth; we know he doesn't die until he's in his 60s), Gowariker needed to put all the more effort into crucial scenes to make us care about the character, to make us desperately want him to defeat enemies - but he failed to create any sense of empathy or any emotional connection.

The acting was also sub-par. Hrithik has talent but he just cannot connect to any director other than his dad. He's worked with Subhash Ghai, Karan Johar, Farhan Akhtar and Suraj Barjatya and he still doesn't hit the level of performance delivered in KNPH, Koi Mil Gaya and Krrish. It's disappointing, but a truly good actor makes any film and any director work for him, and I just don't think he's that good of an actor anymore. I appreciated his effort with Urdu pronunciation (very clear Qaafs) but he just didn't bring any definition to the character. As it we are working with pre-conceived notions of Akbar as Prithviraj Kapoor here. Those are big shoes to fill. But Hrithik neither does it the PRK way, nor does he create a unique Akbar of his own that's worth remembering. He just didn't internalize the character and the resulting performance was quite unremarkable.

Aishwarya made little impression, as usual. Her style is really getting old. She looked pretty but the costumes, while stunning, failed to captivate ones heart. 

Usually in films like this, the supporting cast at least makes up for lack of anything else. But even here J&A disappoints. Suhasini Mulay (Aamir's mother in Lagaan) was totally wasted, she had two lines to speak. As was Khulbushan Kharbanda. A lot of no names made up the supporting young Mughals in Akbar's family and court, but there was no one to write home about. Only two actors delivered remotely interesting performances: Ila Arun as Maham Anga, and Rajesh Vivek as Chugtai Khan. But their roles were superfluous and insignificant in the grand scheme of things, so you never really felt their impact in the overall narrative.

Overall, it was disappointing. Lagaan had set high expectations - you were hooked to the story, caught up in the lives of all the idiosyncratic characters of a small village, engrossed in an entire cricket match, and actually so involved that you didn't want it to end after 4 hours. Jodhaa-Akbar was, unfortunately, exactly the opposite ; I wanted to leave about 15 minutes into it and despite giving it a chance and suffering through the entire saga, I was bored and frustrated. A sad show for Gowariker.