Ask me no questions and you will be told no lies. If you still want to know how this adaptation of Dickens’ Great Expectations is, well, you asked for it.
Fitoor spares nothing, and no one, as it annihilates anything and everything that was beautiful and sacred in the source novel and the milieu this adaptation is set in. For the most part, this massacre is orchestrated by a disastrously miscast Katrina Kaif while some part of the blame should deservedly reach the doors of Aditya Roy Kapoor and Tabu (yes, the lady can misfire too).
Noor is a young boy who loses his sister to a bomb in Srinagar. He grows up to be a painter, gifted one on the cusp of eternal fame types, who is sent to Delhi by an undisclosed benefactor where he becomes an over night sensation and an example to how free and happy Kashmir and its people are in India. It is here that he meets his childhood crush and one true love Firdaus, Katrina, who now reciprocates his feelings. The Havisham of the tale, Tabu both prevents and goads Noor to fall for Firdaus in what is written to be a devastating affair.
Devastating it indeed is, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.
Abhishek Kapoor mounts the film exquisitely. We see Kashmir as a painting, every frame like a screen saver on the latest Mac. The opulence, the grandeur, the clothes, everything is picture perfect. The good things end with that sadly, for the lead pair of this intense love story is a case study in one note expression acting.
Katrina,red hair and porcelain beauty notwithstanding, just cannot portray a single expression on that blank face of hers. Pain, longing, aching for love, anger, everything is just one blank stare into oblivion for her. Coupled with the atrocious criminal diction, where a simple Noor goes to a Knor! Aditya Roy Kapoor matches Katrina note to note, being as wooden as a mannequin as he gets out of every piece of clothing he starts the scene with as if it were a cruse not to be able to handle fabric on his skin. Tabu is saddled with weirdly written parts, which she fumbles and struggles to make sense of. She is overly made up, overly decked, overly verbose and aloof. One yearns for the simplicity she brought to her part in Haider that would have suited this part a lot too. Ajay Devgn in a cameo is the only bearable act here.
What should have been an intense tale of love ends up being a never ending slog fest, even the lissom music in the OST gets replaced by OTT background score killing whatever little joy there was in this enterprise.
It is not that tough to make a film sometimes one wonders. The first step should be to find actors,who can act, not hero and heroine. This basic flaw costs Fitoor any hope of redemption. Stay clear.
mad about moviez.in 