Khuda Haafiz
Managing director: Faruk Kabir
Cast: Vidyut Jammwal, Shivaleeka Oberoi, Ahana Kumra, Shiv Panditt
The woman-rescue trope has been a staple in cinema. Princesses and brides are lost forever and brave men have scaled up mountains and seas in search of them, fighting with villains and befriending foreign golden hearts along the way. Over time, the sleeping princesses became teenage daughters and the brave princes became fathers with a ‘very specific set of skills’. But at its core, the Taken genre is not very different from the fairs we all grew up with.
Watch the trailer for Khuda Haafiz here:
The Khuda Haafiz by Faruk Kabir is a modernized version of the same. A girl is in need and our hero pushes through the heavens to bring her back. Sure, it provides one entertaining watch, but it rarely surprises you.
Khuda Haafiz is said to have been inspired by true events about a man’s search for his wife. Vidyut Jammwal plays a software engineer, Sameer, who is married to Shivaleeka Oberoi’s employee of the call center, Nargis. Their blessed world comes down during the recession of 2007-2008 and they both lose their jobs, forcing them to find work abroad.
The woman finds a job in a fictional Middle Eastern country called Noman. He offers her farewell, hoping to do so with her in a few days. A day later, however, he receives the dreaded Taken Call. The panicked woman tells him that she has been abducted and is being abused by men she does not know. The man arrives directly at Noman International Airport in search of his missing wife. After suffering from a helpless Nomani police and a lazy Indian embassy, a friendly taxi driver, played by Annu Kapoor, is godsend.
Together, the man and the driver discover a meat trading racket in the heart of Noman and his wife sitting in it. With or without the help of police, our software engineer fights 20 men at once, killing a few, driving over a few of them, all to bring his wife back home.
Considering Vidyut’s filmography so far, the action is indeed a bit off-putting. Even with him tackling a few dozen men at once, the action does not seem unbelievable. He does not pull helicopter kicks or jump from cranes, but stabs a man with a fork or throws chillies in the eyes of another. There is an improvised, non-choreographed quality to the fight scenes that brings some semblance of reality. Well, only if they did not play romantic tunes over shots of blood from the jugular vein of a goon.
The music is definitely not the most imaginative. Setting up shots of ‘Noman’ is always preceded by stereotypical ‘Middle Eastern music’ straight from Alif Laila. Old sounds every time a bearded general appears, smoke a mob boss hookah as we see a drone shot from every building with a dome. It’s old, it’s lazy and it’s dead.
The Nomani audience – if it actually existed – would also not have been too happy with the representation of their accents. Now, of course, there is no Nomani accent to really compare it to, but what Shiv Panditt and Ahana Kumra also tried to take away, that was not it. Her accents grow thick and thin with each alternating scene, and each time is more embarrassing than before. While Annu Kapoor seems more of a natural fit in the land of Noman, it was unfortunate that so many characters knew Hindi easily.
Such a shame though, that one of the people who knows Hindi hardly gets a chance to open her mouth. The first time we meet Nargis, the man mutes her voice, just to bask in her beauty. Then Shivaleeka enters only a few lines and then nothing. So little do we know about her that it’s hard not to think of her as lost luggage on a flight. Even though she’s the one being abducted, sold into a meat trade and pushed out of her mind, there’s no scene, a minute devoted to actually humanizing her.
Khuda Haafiz is therefore not without flaws, but it works as an action thriller. Vidyut conveys the nervousness and fear of a man who has lost someone he loves. The dolly zoom and the Snorricam also add to the effect. Panic comes down on him when he gets the call, it shows in his eyes and shaking body. Even when the early shock subsides, he carries the nervousness with him.
An by-the-book thriller, Khuda Haafiz is just entertaining enough. Dive even an inch deeper and the flaws are there for everyone to see.
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