In the recent years, one department in which Hindi films have really shown their professional mastery & ability to impress the viewers right away is their promotional department, with excellence achieved in making a film's theatrical trailers and TV promos. Coming straight to the point, there have been so many instances in the last decade when the promo of a film was so good in its overall appeal and content, but the film was simply nowhere in comparison to the expectations raised from its trailers. In fact most of the times, the film had nothing more than what was already shown in the promos, resulting in a quite disappointing movie in the end, wasting both our money & time together.
Unfortunately, the latest adaptation of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" titled ISSAQalso falls in the same category mentioned above (God knows when they will stop making these similar films repeatedly, last one being ISHAQZADEY) which gives you nothing as promised in its well designed promos. The film is a pretty weak product, with an inconsistent story progression wherein you are not able to find any kind of emotional connect with its lead pair or other characters. It begins well with some well shot scenes but then an erratic kind of editing gives you a series of unimpressive sequences with no proper linking at all indicating a bad film ahead. Contradicting its own genre, this is a love story which completely fails to deliver any likable romance to the viewers and has a few childish and weird romantic scenes too missing that must have on- screen chemistry between the two lovers.
Actually as I felt, ISSAQ is a kind of over-confident film in which every sequence, song or action scene has been shot as if they are making a big path breaking film in Bollywood. Its several untimely inserted scenes, give you a strong feeling that they must have edited it, considering it a major epic in the making for sure (with such irregular cuts). The height of its uncanny creative imagination can be easily guessed from the fact that the film also has a fake Sadhu (Makrand Deshpande) who can lift himself from the ground in air and further when these Sadhus start smoking, there comes a text written on the screen saying, "Character Smoking Herbs not Tobacco". A few boys sitting in the row behind mine literally had a good laugh reading that (along with myself) and I was really stunned to see the way we viewers were considered mere fools by this single line written on the screen (by both the makers and the censors).
Smartly promoted as a highly tense love drama full of guns & murders, ISSAQ has simply got nothing to offer before the interval and it continues moving ahead without any specific direction in its second half too. Such is the impact of its many unconvincing scenes that at a few times I really remembered a line from a comedy serial of 80s (Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi) in which Tiku Talsania used to say in anger
.."Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai?" And probably that should give you a clear idea about the film and its content without any doubts left.
The soundtrack of ISSAQ doesn't add much to the romantic feel of the subject with only one soothing title song and background score tries it too hard (like all other departments) by using more than the required ethnic instruments to give a raw & earthy feel to the film. At times the music becomes a bit over too but the camera-work mostly manages to make its colourful scenes watchable. Still the local warmth and feel of all those Indian locations (Banaras) is strangely not there.
Regarding the performances, ISSAQ can rightly be called an impressive debut movie of Amyra who looks sweet and acts fine in her given role. The girl has got the confidence and spark too which might be visible more brightly in her next ventures. But Prateik is not upto the mark here and needs to make much more efforts to put in some good performances in his coming films. He is not able to win your heart facing all the hardships in the film and thus fails to make an instant connect with the audience playing a spirited lover boy. In the supporting cast, Rajeshwari Sachdeva, Neena Gupta and Ravi Kishan are fine but Prashant Narayan is surprisingly wasted in a very questionable manner. Makrand Deshpande looks silly due to his badly written character but Vineet Kumar Singh & Sudhir Pandey perform well in their few scenes.
In all ISSAQ can easily be called an unexpectedly mediocre product which had a well designed promo, much better than the complete movie itself and there was only one question in my mind as the film got over that, What kind of attempt was this? So consider it strictly avoidable even if you loved its theatrical trailer and title track a lot.
