Review of Wazir

Wazir is a tale of two unlikely friends, a wheelchair-bound chess player and an ATS officer. Brought together by grief and a strange twist of fate, the two men decide to help each other win the biggest games of their lives. But there’s a mysterious, dangerous opponent lurking in the shadows, who is all set to checkmate them. Wazir is about revenge that brews for a long time. Farhan Akhtar and Amitabh Bachchan play the two characters that discover that they have a common enemy. Like all the thrillers, there are chases, shootouts and subtle hints dropped that build the mystery. Manav Kaul plays the villain of the piece supported by a brief but a powerful appearance by Neil Nitin Mukesh. Aditi Rao Hydari plays Farhan Akhtar’s silently suffering wife. Every twist and turn of the plot is explained in details. Wazir is about the coming together of two wounded men, very different in age and temperament, for a mutual purpose. Danish Ali (Farhan Akhtar) is recovering from a deeply personal tragedy and his wife Ruhana (Aditi Rao Hydari) is suffering too in her own solitary corner. He meets up with the wheelchair-bound Omkarnath Dhar (Amitabh Bachchan), and gets sucked into the latter’s world, which is full of light and darkness, the contradictions arising from a painful past loss, and a present trying to come to terms with it. Farhan Akhtar is excellent as the anti-terrorist officer who uses both brain and brawn to tackle the mystery which lurks in the heart of the film, and Amitabh Bachchan shows us, in a couple of beautifully realized scenes in which he dispenses all mannered flourish, the skill sets he still possesses. The plot twists, and with it comes a menacing figure called Wazir, trailing blood, horror and death. The plot of the film is smart because it uses an actual chess board to tell us how to make moves. Manav Kaul’s power-hungry politician plays someone he is not pleasing with economy. Wazir is the fact that the mystery itself is thin, illogical and predictable. It’s a pity because Wazir’s lead performances, its glassy cinematography, its haunting sound design, work well. What this game needed was more attack, less defensive, less repetition, more relentlessness. It is a suspense drama. For long, Bollywood has not seen a thrilling suspense drama and the drought could well end up with Wazir. The film provides with an edge of the seat suspense drama that will keep you guessing.