11 Aug 2022

Lal Singh Chadda - Faithful but snooze fest



Rating: 2/5

Cast - Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Naga Chaitanya, Mona Singh

Director - Advait Chandan

Writer - Atul Kulkarni

                 Based on    Forrest Gump by Winston Groom and Eric Roth)

Producer - Aamir Khan, Kiran Rao, Jyoti Deshpande, Ajit Andhare

Cinematographer - Satyajit Pande (Setu)

Editor - Hemanti Sarkar

Music Score - Tanuj Tiku

Songs - Pritam

Production companies - Aamir Khan Productions, Viacom18 Studios

 

Story: A simple minded guy narrates his life experiences and relationships in his perspective to a bunch of people in the train, how this guy from a small village in Pathankot met diverse people and circumstances in his life forms the next part of the story. 

Analysis: As everyone mostly know this movie is an adaptation of the English movie Forrest Gump which won laurels for its lead role Tom Hanks for the brilliant portrayal of the character the director Robert Zemeckis for direction and Eric Roth for the brilliant on-screen adaptation. 

Adapting such a movie was always a tough task which would come with huge expectations and the Hindi team have stayed true to the original movie without tweaking much of the story, many of the scenes are translated literally with even the background sets and locations mostly reminding you of the original.

Until the interval the movie mostly runs on expected lines with Aamir putting up the best performance as a person who seems to "walk into" events without understanding the intricacies or the importance of it, this brings in laughter mostly due to the earnestness in which Aamir performs, the kid who played young Lal Singh is brilliant while the other cast are okay with everyone going through their routine and except for Mona Singh not a single performance in notable. Naga Chaitanya was impressive in a small cameo.

The movie falters post the interval with the writing getting routine with drab dialogues and scenes which are routine, the extended long climax which is not in the original tests our patience and there is little Aamir Khan can do to save this sinking ship, one stops thinking about the character and all we wonder is when this journey will end - the songs doesn't work and seem to be force fitted except for the first song.

Technical Departments : The background score by Pritam reminds us of the original in mostly many important scenes while the songs are nothing noteworthy and worse they don't seem to be fit into the narrative while the writing by Atul Kulkarni is amateurish, we don't have many notable lines - the dialogue which work is mostly straight lifted from the original while the set design and art work looks good the best visuals being the house and the village fields.

 

What Works: Most part of the first half, the humour works because of Aamir, we do feel the emotion of this person narrating his story,

 

What doesn't work: The elongated second half with forceful songs and some lengthy monologues which doesn't take the story or the emotions anywhere.

 

Final Word: The comparison with the original movie is expected since the makers have set the movie up to remind you of the original in almost all scenes, they have tried to keep it faithful for the most part but have failed to carry the emotion in the same way - who is the reason for this? It’s difficult to tell, Aamir Khan has tried his earnest but he is no match to Tom Hanks while Kareena Kapoor and the other supporting cast need not be mentioned too it's no fault of theirs the original is so good that it's difficult to recreate it - the director should have kept the basic plot intact and should have got his own perspective to it so that it would be more emotionally connected to Indian audience the director has failed spectacularly in that, final view is that Laal Singh Chaddha is a snooze fest copy of the original which doesn't add anything but bores you to your wits end.

 

 

 

 

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