Laal Singh Chaddha Review
Released on August 12, Aamir Khan’s latest movie Laal Singh Chaddha has received mixed reviews from its viewers. The film cannot be called a success. Infact, it was a poor remake of it’s Hollywood original, Forrest Gump. The title character Laal played by Aamir, is a mamma’s boy, and has a childhood sweetheart Rupa(Kareena Kapoor) who left him. This is a film about Laal’s journey to self discovery, with Aamir Khan trying his best to imitate Hanks in the movie but ended up increasing the tempo of the movie atmosphere. While the original had a soft approach in portraying the character, this hindi remake localised the movie with the title character’s Punjabi accent and a body language which reminds us of PK.
The story revolves around Laal’s train journey to Chandigarh from Pathankot with insights given to his childhood life. His tough mother, his childhood sweetheart, his childhood hardships, the wars occured, the friends he made, the pain he had to go through, the time when he faced death, everything has been captured clean and portrayed well. All the actors has done their part impressively, true to their characters, except Aamir. Aamir’s portrayal of Laal was a tad extra that I often expected him to keep it simple whereas Kareena managed to stay true to her character keeping it perfectly balanced. Chay Akkineni also has given us a commendable performance and so does Mona Singh who portrayed Aamir’s mother. I feel like Aamir’s best scenes where with Kareena and the rest of the scenes gave me a PK vibe.
The movie lacked the drama it deserved. With a long 167 minutes, you can’t expect the viewers to watch a bland film. Laal doesn’t have an enemy, the movie is his revelations about life which he eventually discovered in his journey through routine life problems, which we have seen a hundred times before. Nevertheless Direct Advait Chandan made sure that his movie holds on to the beautiful traditional values in this era of cultural changes, and had a given us a movie to be watched with our families. Despite the poor portrayal of Forrest, Aamir has spoken through his character to treat everyone nicely irrespective of their religion and to save humanity.
Aamir Khan’s film used to leave us teary-eyed but no scene in this movie had an emotional impact like that on its audience. The screenplay lacked the X factor it deserved, hence the story feels flat. The 2nd half the movie feels empty and dragged. To be honest, the entire movie was dragged for no reason but movie production values were great. The movie beginning set in the 80’s were shifted to recent timelines quite beautifully. Overall the movie disappointed me to a great extent. I have seen amazing performance from Aamir Khan before and the fact that he seemed lost in this movie.