Don't worry about spoilers, because I didn't care enough about this pile of crap to sit it out. First off, know that I made an effort to watch this. I really tried. However, this movie is simply not good. It's quite bad, in fact. Terrible.
Let me start with the acting. I'm not insinuating that the actors in this film are not talented. In fact, I feel like with the right roles, they could really make waves. That being said, this movie is horrendously overacted, with no room for subtlety or wit of any kind. No, it's as if they didn't respect the audience enough to let us figure out what was happening, and just exaggerated everything they did to drive it in further. I'm not going to blame the actors on this too much, because I feel this is also a consequence of the direction.
The film has an even more fundamental problem than the acting. The story, while compelling, and perhaps watchable in some other, vastly different form, is just poorly executed in nearly every aspect. The dialogue is clunky, every scene is written poorly, and the movie is just badly written.
But these are all maybe forgivable. What is absolutely unforgivable is the unsteady, awful, nauseating, and horrendous cinematography. Every single shot, and I mean every shot, is ruined by distracting sweeps and random zooming. It's as if either the cinematographer learned some tricks and decided to play with them while shooting instead of doing his job, or he just spent the whole movie trying to find the right zoom. Either way, it is awful. I will admit that in terms of the quality of the image, as in hue, saturation, all that, it looks pretty decent. But this is all ruined by the impatience of the camera-work. Maybe the director saw one shot he liked, and he thought that he could do it again. I wouldn't mind if he did it periodically. He literally does the same sweep and zoom in on a character at least 8 times in a row in the same scene. It is the most distracting, annoying, and disappointing technical work I have ever laid my eyes on.
I am not as much angry about this movie as I am flummoxed, as to how such a horrendous movie ever got passed into production, how it got through multiple people, how at least one person besides the director said, "Yeah, that looks good." If this movie was directed by somebody else, maybe I would enjoy it. If the cinematographer took a more straightforward, narrative approach to using the camera, maybe I would enjoy it. If the screenplay wasn't so distracted and irrelevant to itself, maybe I would enjoy it. Throughout watching the movie, one can't help but think that the filmmakers sacrificed integrity and the artistic prospects of the film to create easy drama and cheap thrills.
This is one of the arising problems in movies these days. People think that they can get away with anything, as long as they show enough action and include the components of a 'thriller'. The story, which, as I mentioned before, could be compelling in other hands, is oftentimes tangential to the plot itself. They tried to throw everything they wanted to do into this movie, to get an easy, profitable result, instead of being noble and taking the challenge of creating a work of art. I don't wish to hurt the filmmakers personally, but I implore them and others to really work hard on their next movie. I hope they don't take the easy route and do basically everything wrong like it was in Bhajarangi. I really hope they try. Unfortunately, it is more likely that they'll ignore art in favor of money.
