Review: 'Azaan' is just action

Film: Azaan
Director: Prashant Chadha
Cast: Aarya Babbar, Sachiin J Joshi, Candice Boucher, Ravi Kissen
Rating: **

Now come on! You tout a film as Playboy playmate Candice Boucher’s Bollywood debut and she doesn’t even kiss in the film? After a long wait, she only comes on screen for a while wearing a translucent white dress that suggests that she is wearing a blue bikini underneath. End of all sizzles. The audience will definitely feel cheated because a Playboy cover girl has been covered up and unlike other hard-core action flicks, there is actually zero sleaze factor. The rest of the film is only dhishum dhishum and Ravi Kissen mouthing the most suspensebhare dialogues. The film is only about debutant Sachin Joshi (well, this spelling might not be the numerically approved one) who mouths fewer dialogues and throws himself and his arms around.

Sachin has worked hard for the film because it seems that he has rehearsed the action sequences well and the same has been executed deftly by a very well-versed action director. Like all debutants, if you put this new hero under the scrutiny, you get a number of flaws. Sachin is not as tall, hence the action director tends to focus more on his face when he should be capturing his body movements. The camera angles also fail to hide that Candice is much taller than him. Sachin speaks less and doesn’t have too many emotional scenes barring a few nightmares that he keeps having throughout the film. Aly Khan and Ravi do not do a bad job, but you can make out that Ravi is putting an extra effort to sound dramatic, which really doesn’t work. Rest of the film is all about action.

Now some good points to round it up — out of all the action scenes, one stands out as outstanding. In the final moments of the film, you will find a brand new sports car ripped apart by a divider captured from different angles by a slow-motion camera. Very good. There are outstanding locales that have been used in the film that has been shot in Morocco, Hong Kong, Algeria, Poland, France, Germany. Good. The climax has been shot in Chechnya — an ecological disaster zone. Not bad at all.

Watch the film if you have nothing to do on weekends and just want to do some timepass.