Shadow - Movie Review

Cast: Nasser Khan, Sonali Kulkarni, Milind Soman, Hrishita Bhatt

Director: Rohit Nayyar

Rating: *1/2 (But three cheers for the brave effort)

Producer: Nasser Khan

Music: Anand Raaj Anand

We often crib about the hard part of reviewing films. We have to watch all sorts of bad movies. Reviewing ‘Shadow’ is equally hard. But this time there are more dimensions. ‘Shadow’ is a regular film and yet it is not. While it is an attempt to make a regular thriller, at helm of things is a blind person Nasser Khan, producing and acting in it. To make things tougher he enacts a person who can see very well. And despite all these factors we are expected to show no bias. Hard task, considering we are human beings too!
 
Cutting a long story short, with a blind person at helm who is making the film to portray to the world that being ‘handicapped’ is not the end of the world, we got to see ‘Shadow’ is not as bad as I expected it to be. Nasser does a great job as a producer giving the director enough space to make it look like a big budget venture. ‘Shadow’ looks clean. It has been shot well, edited sleek, DI done well – in all production values which could very well make Nasser a dream producer. He is decent as an actor too, considering he does the dialogue well enough. The cinematographer does a clever job trying to hide Nasser’s handicap.
 
However, the good part ends there. Getting out of the compassionate self, ‘Shadow’ is a badly written script. It has stereotypical characters, awful dialogues and less attention given to details. Songs pop up out of nowhere and the music is nothing great. Locales in Bangkok have been passed off as Mumbai, unconvincingly. Characters are not explained well. Milind Soman is shown as a print reporter holding a recorder and suddenly shown reporting on TV, still holding the recorder. Whatever happened to the TV boom! Hrishita Bhatt’s character makes a mysterious exit and suddenly comes out at the end. There are a couple of surprising twists but they don’t hold you too long because of the number of loopholes otherwise.
 
Performance-wise Vishwajeet Pradhan probably does the most convincing act as the commissioner and Sonali’s father. And he is not even important for the film. Milind Soman does well in his sketchy character. Sonali Kulkarni really needs to lose weight before she thinks of doing another item number in short clothes like the one she wore. Inedible stuff! Other characters not used at all.
 
Overall ‘Shadow’ is bad when you compare it to our regular stuff. But it is not the worst. It, in fact, has been made in a way that makes it look pretty high budget and there are some interesting twists. And Nasser Khan deserves a pat on his back... it is not easy to do what he did!