Movie Review – ‘Wajah Tum Ho’ – A Diluted Version Of An Abbas-Mustan Template

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

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This is how a typical Abbas–Mustan film plays like. It worked big time for most of their films, though Race 2 did turn out to be a bit underwhelming. Director Vishal Pandya is clearly influenced by the style patented by the director duo. Nothing wrong with that; after all it did work out big time in Hate Story 3. He goes for a similar formula in Wajah Tum Ho aa well. However, what comes out in the end is a bit diluted product. A  touter approach, some more zing in the execution, a bit less of on-your-face mystery solving (which one could see coming to some extent) and a quicker movement from pre-climax to climax would have made it a much tighter product.

First and foremost, it is quite apparent that the core themes of the film – hacking and live murder on television – are nothing but clear marketing pegs for the film. Even without these, and with somewhat simpler treatment, the film would still have been the same. These elements do bring in some technical jargon in the first half of the film but when looked at in retrospective after the end credits start rolling, they don’t really add much to the film. Secondly, the whole erotic-thriller element is again just a peg where there is no erotica whatsoever. If you have seen the promos and the songs, you have seen it all. As a matter of fact the erotic element is much more concentrated in a two and a half minutes promo when compared to it being spread out over 120 minutes of the film’s playing time.

A whodunit and a whydunit, the film has a live murder right at the beginning of the film where a cop (Sharman Joshi), with help of a public prosecutor (Gurmeet Choudhary) begins to investigate a media house CEO (Rajniesh Duggall) to get to the depth of this crime. Latter is defended by his Legal Head (Sana Khan) though, until more and more truth begins to get unraveled. As it continues to get revealed that there are many more players in the game, you do begin to get hints around what lies under the surface. That said, one has to credit Vishal and his team for coming up with a novel storyline that indeed carries a lot of potential.

That said, there are loopholes galore in the film and I would refrain from bringing them here as that would result in spoilers being revealed. However, one point worth wondering is that how could a media house magnate hire people at some of the top positions in his organization without a thorough background check. Watch the film and you would know what I mean here!

What still works for the film till the last 10 minutes of the film is its fast pace. This is something that Vishal Pandya has done in the past too and hence when he gets the right shot taking, background score and edit pattern together, you are reasonably glued. However, each of the four songs that comes in the film is totally avoidable in the context of the narrative and nothing would have been lost had none of these actually existed. Of course given the fact that a music company (T-Series) is backing the film, music becomes a key component to revenue generation. Still, Wajah Tum Ho would have been a much crisper affair had it been a songless affair.

What it could also have done without was the dishoom-dishoom that happens towards the end. It was just not needed. The film does have some good scenes to offer though when it comes to the dramatic and thrilling quotient. This is aided further by competent acts, what with Sharman Joshi playing with confidence, Sana Khan bringing the right mix of beauty with brains, Rajniesh Duggall playing a different kind of a part quite competently and Gurmeet getting a meatier role when compared to his last release Khamoshiyaan. Another TV actor Himanshu Malhotra has a small but important part to play and is decent.

This is how the overall film plays too. It is decent but that’s about it. If you miss it then there isn’t much of a loss. However if you end up watching it, you would have some bit of fair entertainment for most part of the narrative.