The pawn that narrowly misses

After a long time a Bollywood movie promised a pairing worth drooling over. No, it wasn’t the popular Ranbir-Deepika jori, but something entirely different. And entirely unromantic. Wazir, that hit cinema screens across the globe on the second weekend of 2016, promised to bring together two of the finest actors active in Bollywood: the legend Amitabh Bachchan and the apprentice Farhan Akhtar.

I say “apprentice” because Farhan Akhtar, although a proven actor of the modern era, isn’t quite there yet in the uppermost echelon of actors produced by Indian cinema’s 68-year-old history. However, films like Wazir are likely to help him edge closer to that highly coveted top-drawer.

It is failure to confound the viewer that Wazir misses out on

So what is this Amitabh-Farhan starrer about?

The film, produced and written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra – the latter along with Abhijat Joshi – and directed by Bejoy Nambiar, explores the lives of chess grandmaster Pandit Omkarnath Dhar (Amitabh Bachchan) and ATS officer, Daanish Ali (Farhan Akhtar). The unusual pair that seemingly has nothing in common is united by their common grief of having lost their only child. While Daanish loses his young daughter, Noorie, in the film’s opening scene, Pandit Omkarnath had lost his grown up daughter, Nina, a year earlier.

Daanish, whose daughter was killed in a firing exchange between the ATS (Anti-Terrorism Squad) and terrorist Farooq Rameez’s men, suffers immense emotional distress because he holds himself responsible for his daughter’s death. The relationship between him and his wife, Ruhanna (Aditi Rao Hydari), also becomes strained, and he is also suspended from service for murdering Rameez in a later encounter, in open violation of his seniors’ orders. It is at this point in his life that Daanish meets Pandit Omkarnath, a disabled chess grandmaster who used to teach his daughter chess.

Daanish soon discovers that Omkarnath’s daughter had died a year earlier at the home of Welfare Minister, Yazaad Qureshi (Manav Kaul), reportedly by slipping and falling down the stairs. However, Omkarnath himself holds Qureshi responsible for Nina’s murder. One day, out of his hatred for Qureshi, Omkarnath drives off to a highway via which Qureshi and his protocol is set to pass, and hurls his shoe at Qureshi’s car. A few days after this incident, Daanish receives a call from Omkarnath’s attendant, informing him that somebody had come and attacked Omkarnath. Daanish drives to the grandmaster’s place to find his hands brutally mauled and his wheelchair set on fire. Omkarnath tells Daanish that a man named Wazir (Neil Nitin Mukesh) came to his place and attacked him for showing disrespect to Yazaad Qureshi.

Omkarnath claims to be repeatedly threatened by Wazir, until one day, on his way to the airport to catch a plane to Kashmir where Qureshi is scheduled to deliver a speech, Omkarnath’s car is blown up. Furious at Pandit Jee’s murder, Daanish decides to avenge his death. He flies to Kashmir and manages to find and kill Yazaad Qureshi.



A few days later, while watching a chess-themed play enacted by Panjit Omkarnath’s students, the truth of Omkarnath’s story dawns upon Daanish. In the story, Omkarnath himself is the pawn – the weakest piece on the chessboard that has the ability to become the strongest, the queen (or wazir), if it makes the right moves and reaches the other end of the board – and Daanish is the bishop (haathi), whose true strength is unleashed when the pawn in front of it is killed. The only thing the skilled viewer or chess enthusiast can say to that is, “touché”.

But the credit for earning that lord of praises doesn’t remotely go out to the film’s story or direction.

While Wazir manages to thrill, emotionally distress and infuriate the viewer – which itself is quite a lot for one film – it nevertheless fails to achieve one key target that is essential for any successful mystery movie: the ability to puzzle the viewer. The one thing that a good mystery movie must have is a good twist at the end that stumps even the smartest of viewers. It is failure to confound the viewer that Wazir misses out on, and not entirely due to any smartness on the viewer’s part, but due to the storyteller and director’s inability to keep the twist a secret.

The fact that Pandit Omkarnath was deliberately trying to woo Daanish into becoming his muscleman and aide in his war against Yazaad Qureshi was deliberately made obvious by the director, and so was the fact that the character of Wazir could very easily be Omkarnath’s own creation since nobody else had ever seen him. Had the screenwriters not been so careless with the plot, Wazir could have been much, much better.

However, what Wazir loses in its plot, it manages to gain in its dialogue. As has already been mentioned, the chess analogies that are sprinkled throughout the film are what makes the film a piece of art, more than a sensational Bollywood flick.

Bollywood filmmakers can learn from the artistry of Wazir and employ more depth in their films' dialogues

As for the performances, there is very little need for praising Amitabh Bachchan’s act as Pandit Omkarnath Dhar – he does quite a remarkable job in portraying the various facets of the disabled man, from the chess genius to the mourning, enraged father. However, storywriters could have made his character more believable by making him more dependent upon other people, which, in turn, would have made the twist at the end a little bit more surprising.

Farhan Akhtar continues his fine acting form, managing to fill up all the nooks and crannies of his character, the reserved yet strong-willed ATS officer, Daanish. The most notable feature of Farhan Akhtar’s act is that it is not only in Daanish’s most emotionally charged moments – when, for instance, he is holding a gun to his chin sitting before his daughter’s grave – that he shows his true acting brilliance, but also in the moments in which his character is his “normal”, every day, reserved self. The ability to know when and how much to act is truly the mark of a great actor.

Other than the two leadsmen, the performances of both supporting actor, Manav Kaul, as the deceptively calm and criminal (the lethal combination that makes a successful politician) Yazaad Qureshi, and Aditi Rao Hydari, the quiet and mournful wife of Daanish, are both commendable.

Despite the fact that, for me, Wazir is the pawn that narrowly misses the last square, this scribe is positive about the motion picture as a whole. This achievement is largely due to the film’s dialogue which is reminiscent of the classic, metaphor-laden scripts of Salim Javed and Kader Khan. Bollywood filmmakers can, indeed, learn from the artistry of Wazir and employ more depth in their films’ dialogues – it’ll only make them look smarter, something they desperately need.

Khadija Mughal is based in Karachi