A flight to nowhere in particular

Film: Hawaizaada

Director: Vibhu Puri

Cast: Mithun Chakraborty, Ayushmann Khurrana, Pallavi Sharda, Naman Jain

Inventing something new or doing something never done before involves a lot of excitement. If you are able to capture and contain that excitement in a paragraph of writing, or a scene or even a song, you have a winner.

Sadly, Hawaizaada , despite all the painstaking effort that has gone into recreating an era (even if it feels like a Sanjay Leela Bhansali-minus-budget production), is devoid of anything even remotely exciting and given the material and the premise, this is a criminal waste of an idea. Hawaizaada feels more like the makers are trying to figure out how to tell a story than build a flying machine. Unfortunately, while the flying machine finally finds its magic fuel (through a contrived Enid Blyton-esque clue from the Vedas), the film manages to find neither an engine nor the fuel.

There’s a hotchpotch love story thrown in that’s only made more bland by the half-cooked plot of a girl the inventor cannot have until he’s built the plane.

Even if you forgive the artificial flavouring rendered by the Bhansali-influenced set-design, it is impossible to overlook the lack of science in a film about invention. Ayushmann Khurrana looks like he took all his acting lessons on being an inventor from Koi Mil Gaya ’s Hrithik Roshan. Except that Hrithik’s Rohit was autistic. And Pallavi Sharda, as pretty as she is, never manages to rise above an underwritten character.

While Hawaizaada takes half a film to get to the debatable “recorded” piece of history — that Shivkar Talpade flew an unmanned plane in the presence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak — the second half of the film about his attempt to fly a plane seems completely revisionist and fictional, and even fantastical in the absence of logic or science. There are a few good moments thrown in the midst of this chaotic storytelling. and muddled up narrative that doesn’t seem to make up its mind about what the film is — a melodrama, a love story, a musical, a scientific journey or a revisionist biopic? In trying to be everything, Hawaizaada is burdened by all excess weight. The heavy, loosely- strung-together contraption of a film jumps off a cliff in an attempt to fly without ever figuring out how to land.

Sudhish Kamath