Throughout the movie, Azaan is continuously told that he has Allah ka haath over him. If it fetches him a decent opening at the box-office, we will believe it
Azaan
A; Action
DIR: Prashant Chadha
CAST: Sachiin J Joshi, Candice Boucher, Ravi Kissen, Aarya Babbar, Alyy Khan, Dalip Tahil
Raitng: '1/2
An avid watcher of James Bond, The Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible and all such thriller, action flicks decides to make a movie. Inspired by the high-octane stuff, he wants to recreate the same effect. He even wants to act in it. With a lavish budget at his disposal, he sets forth scouring locations across the globe.
Fancy car chases that tumble up in a pile, jumping from rooftops, zipping from one exotic place to another and... oh yes... there's even a girl. But in hot pursuit of all these trappings, the script is left home. Or perhaps he felt that didn't matter. The continent hopping visuals will do the needful.
The intentions may have been honourable but what really irks in Azaan is the lack of narrative. Like a jigsaw puzzle, you try to fathom what goes where as the hero jumps from one exotic city to another.
Protagonist Azaan Khan (Joshi) is a man on a mission. He works with India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). Apart from wiping the scars of his childhood memories spent killing in Afghanistan, he is now trying to save India from a deadly biological weapon. At the same time, he is also trying to trace his missing brother Aman, who went to England to study at Oxford, but landed up being a terrorist working for the same group Azaan is after. And while on his mission, Azaan meets a bunch of assorted characters of various nationalities who want to bump him off.
Somewhere in the second half comes Aafreen (Boucher), a Moroccan sand artist who Azaan promptly falls for and the message that the real enemy of India is not in the West but in the East (hint: whose population matches our country!).
The cinematography especially in the foreign locales is appealing, but when there is such a disjointed story (Chadha along with Heeraz Marfatia and Shubra Swarup) after a while you give up. Thankfully for long patches Joshi does not have too many dialogues to spew, otherwise that fixed gaze leaves you to decipher the emotion he is trying to portray. Boucher's acting is akin to a video shoot of her during a still photo shoot. The rest of the supporting cast (Kissen, Babbar, Khan) do their character role bits in a film that was made for Joshi.
Throughout the movie, Azaan is continuously told that he has Allah ka haath over him. If it fetches him a decent opening at the box-office, we will believe it.
