Movie Review: Jodhaa Akbar

Posted February 16th, 2008 by aslam

To start off, let me just say that Jodhaa Akbar is more closer to Swades than Lagaan. What I mean by that is it's an average movie that is long and doesn't necessarily care if the viewers are involved in the proceedings on screen. Without sounding too harsh, it feels that Ashutosh Gowarikar without Aamir Khan is just an average director, who thinks he can make mega movies, but he doesn't have the talent to handle subjects like these.

Let's see why this movie is a proof that AG is an average director. The movie has great storyline, which I'm sure we've all heard a billion times so that wasn't the attraction, Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya deliver great performances, which again should be expected. The supporting cast did their best and sets were no Sanjay Leela sets, but they're fine (we'll come back to that). So more than half the job was done, all Ashutosh Gowarikar had to do was tell a story in a way so that it's fun. I remember at least 10-15 times in the movie, where I looked at my watch and wondered why is that scene in the movie and more importantly when is this movie going to end. There were no sequences that would make your pulse race or make you look forward to what was going to happen. The scenes were done quite unimaginatively, literally, it was like he took inspiration for those love scenes, war scenes (which were seriously awful) and other drama scenes from several other Hindi movies (again not bad, but just nothing new about them).

Lot of people I talked to said that the movie was really long and if they had cut it short, it would have been a good movie. Maybe, but if you are not a good story teller, doesn't matter if you have 5 minutes or 3 hours, they will just seem like a lifetime for your audience. Which is what I think is the problem with this movie - just plain, boring way of telling such a great story. Seriously Discovery of India did a much better job than most of these period movies.

I think what would have helped would have been to focus on one theme. I mean Ashutosh Gowarikar is no Francis Ford Coppola, so he should have either focused on one of the many traits of Akbar - the lover, the great king or the great warrior. Trying to show all three things in a movie, just means that you are not devoting enough time on any.

Now let's talk about the good things about the movie. Once again its a timeless story that has a lot of room for interpretation and even if its told as a biography, which this movie attempts to do, its still a truly remarkable story - that has a love angle, war angle, treachery angle, I mean pretty much all the ingredients of an epic. Then, Hrithik Roshan just completely morphed into the role of Akbar. If you see him, especially in the second half, he doesn't remind you at all of the bare chested Hrithik dancing in Dhoom 2. Aishwarya in a follow up of her great job in Guru, delivers another good performance. Sonu Sood, Ila Arun and other supporting cast is good, although they don't have much of a scope in the movie. The songs were not needed but they are fine, not the best ARR composition, but some songs were good.

So its not a total loss if you go and watch that movie, it's just that with that kind of crew you expect a much better result then what came out. I guess Ashutosh isn't as demanding as the perfectionist Aamir Khan :-) so most people just mailed it in. The other glaring lack of creativity that you see in Ashutosh, is the creation of sets. I mean seriously Akbar is one of the greatest emperors in the history and if you are watching a movie that deals with his love story, I am expecting something grander than a Devdas. This was not even close. I think Karan Johar or Sanjay Leela would have done a MUCH better job in handling those aspects. The other thing that really baffles me is the inability of Indian directors to shoot good war scenes. It's definitely not the lack of money, its just the lack of imagination. I mean they'll shoot a song in 15 different locations in the world, so they definitely have the money. The war scenes in this movie were a joke. There was one army that Akbar was fighting that seemed like they had dressed for a Garba dance and not a war....

Anyways I can go on and on, but you get the picture. Everything was there, but the most important thing about making a movie, which was missing here, was a desire to make a truly great movie. It's very disappointing to see that someone who gets hailed as one of the top directors in India can deliver a mediocre product like this. It's bad because Hrithik gave a great performance, much better than he does for his dad because he was hoping this could be his Mughal-e-Azam, but unfortunately it wasn't even close.

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