Haiwaan Review:
Priyadarshan has a command over comedies. Sadly, this talent is unintentionally on display in Haiwaan, a cat-n-mouse chase thriller featuring a visually-impaired saviour and a psychopathic serial killer. You laugh where you should be scared and are confused where you should be engaged. The screenplay is so stuffed that it spills from the get go. The innumerable and unnecessary song sequences don’t help. Akshay Kumar in a nun dress, Conjuring style, also doesn’t help. A remake of Priyadarshan’s own Malayalam film Oppam (2016), Haiwaan stays loyal to the original but still comes out weirder.
Director: Priyadarshan
Writers: Rohan Shankar,,Abilash Nair, and Priyadarshan
Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Akshay Kumar, Rajpal Yadav, Sharib Hashmi, Shriya Pilgaonkar, and Saiyami Kher
Saif Ali Khan plays Shyam, the building manager of a high-rise housing society in Mumbai. He might be visually-impaired but he has superhero-level senses. He is trained in martial arts and can identify people from their smell and their walk. He is also the Man Friday for a retired judge (Boman Irani) who is a resident in the building. The judge tells him about Parshuram (Akshay Kumar), a man he wrongfully convicted in a rape case which led to the latter’s family killing itself and leading him into a mental institution. Now, the psycho Parshuram is out and on the hunt, killing everyone who wronged him along with their families (their exact identities and how they aided in prosecuting Parshuram is still a mystery). Shyam is tasked with protecting the judge’s secret daughter, who studies in a boarding school.
It’s not just this, there is also a track of Shyam struggling to amass money to get his sister married. In the housing society, a house-help Naina (Shriya Pilgaonkar) is having trouble with her toxic and estranged husband. There is also an unnecessary angle of two young love-birds trying to find a nest to neck. Saiyami Kher is there as a cop who gets to point a gun.
At any given point, there is so much happening in Haiwaan that it is tough to join the dots. Plotlines are introduced and then quickly left to dangle. The film, a dark-thriller by the looks of it, has a sweet song in the beginning. Then there is another sweet song featuring Saif Ali Khan and the judge’s daughter. Then comes a dance number. There are also forced product placements. Resultantly, an already incoherent narrative keeps getting derailed. The film seems to be mounted as a project, given a masala treatment where it should have been a lean and mean psychological thriller. Every scene seems to be staged like a stage play. Characters don’t converse but give context.
Haiwaan has two big stars of the Hindi film industry locking horns but that excitement doesn’t translate on screen. Saif’s Shyam is visually-impaired but complete suspension-of-disbelief accurate. At times he felt like a superhuman being (a scene shows his twisted limbs, after a police-beating, crack back to their original state). Akshay on the other hand seems to be hamming his way through. His idea of playing a psycho killer is giving a booming villainous cackle, like he is embodying Raavan in a street play. His line delivery invokes not dread but unintentional guffaws.
Haiwaan picks up a bit in the second half when we have laboured through the scattered screenplay and forced-fitted comic sketches featuring Rajpal Yadav, the late Asrani and Sharib Hashmi. The film becomes more focussed on the battle of brains and brawn between Saif and Akshay but by then your mind has become a muddled mess. You stop caring. Akshay Kumar continues to lurk around Saif, trying to figure out where he might have hidden the judge’s daughter. You can think of real-life parallels as Akshay flips a swiss knife in front of Saif, but that’s all Haiwaan has become by then, a cheap thrill.
