Waar: Is it a hit?

Imagine an interrogation room and two suspects being questioned by a gruff yet handsome interrogator with a I-don’t-give-a-damn look on his face.

Suddenly, he grabs the hand of the weaker looking suspect, places it against the table and shoots, asks questions again, then shoots his other hand when they still don’t answer and proceeds to shoots the weaker one on point blank range, saying “I need only one of you to get the answers”.

Now, hold on to something as I tell you that this is a scene right out of the most awaited Pakistani movie Waar.

I was pretty skeptical about watching Waar ( I won’t deny waiting and getting frustrated when it didn’t release earlier as planned by the officials), it definitely made the list of movies I bother watching right at the cinema as soon as it releases.

Social networking sites were filled with pre and post movie criticisms, pointing out the fact that the movie had nothing special with it’s thread-bare script, it’s language, and lack of flow and thrill but even with these negative criticisms, Waar managed to grab the audience and had an unexpected turnout as it broke the record of an Indian movie that was released last Eid.

Excited and still trying to get my mind to not expect greatness from the movie as we all know how “amazing” Lollywood is, I went to the cinema on the fourth day of Eid and exited in a speechless state. I had not expected a mere Pakistani movie to impress me.

As I had guessed the movie had the clichéd “War on Terrorism” theme with a hero, a special-ops agent – who was in a dark place because an enemy killed his family- had to make a choice between holding on to his past or letting go and doing something for his beloved country, as he was the only one aware of how the big, bad villain of the movie looked like.

The story line was mostly inspired by the attack on the Police Academy in Lahore, which was included in the film as well. What had me interested from the first minute into the movie was the grand – yet controlled – sound design, awesome music score, amazing cinematography and the right balance between the action scenes and the dialogues by the director.

I’ve seen my fair share of action thrillers by Bollywood and it’s pretty safe to say that their directors take the actions scenes way too far with too much of everything and I was glad to see things not being way too over done.

The music score for Waar was more than just simply awesome: Qayyas, an underrated band, provided the perfect heavy metal soundtrack and the cinematography to the song Mauje Naina will blow your freaking mind.

I’ll try not to ruin this movie for our readers but I simply cannot not tell you the scene that had me speechless and in tears.

Hamza Abbasi plays one of the supporting roles as the gun happy special ops agent. He will win your heart from the start with his smart mouth and love for the country. As the team is running an important operation to uncover the plan of the Undercover R.A.W. agent hell-bent on bombing Pakistan, he comes to a cross road where he has to decide between the whole team blowing up or his driving away the truck full of explosives that he discovered.

He thus calls his sister on the satellite phone as he takes no time deciding what to do and after hearing her voice, he gets into the truck and drives away. Now the cinematography of this scene is amazing. The sky view of a dark, curvy road is shown as the cinema drowns in silence. The only light on the screen is of the headlights of the truck and Hamza Abbasi’s gruff singing the national anthem which will have you covered in goosebumps and then when you least expect it, the truck goes boom.

However, I won’t deny the script was rusted, more than half of the movie being in English which failed to do justice to the dialogues and the actors still needing to work on their skills but keeping all that aside, I would definitely recommend people to go, buy a ticket and watch the movie.

It’s a start to the so called revival of Pakistani cinema with movies like Zinda Bhag, Josh, Waar and the upcoming Moor, I’m sure Pakistan is going to get it’s name recognized as we are not short on talent; we just need a bit of polishing.