Awarapan 2

It’s no secret that mainstream Hindi cinema today is so empty that we tend to look at previous decades — and even their most middling movies — through rose-tinted lenses. It’s why so many of them become ‘cult classics’. A song here, a mood there. A brooder here, a plotline there. In that sense, Emraan Hashmi is the Vibe Resurgent. I mean 2000s Emraan Hashmi, but it goes without saying. As The Ba***ds of Bollywood recently surmised, it’s the only Hashmi that stopped time in the commercial landscape: the antihero blessed with a musicality that made his movies heard harder than they were seen. In that sense, the nostalgia for Mohit Suri’s Awarapan (2007) is so strong that even a 140-minute-long slow-mo sequence of a smoking Hashmi striding towards the camera to the sound of ‘Toh Phir Aao’ would’ve done the job. Credit to director Nitin Kakkar and writer Bilal Siddiqi for conceiving a whole sequel around it to farm that aura. The moments that matter still revolve around the buildup and use of Pritam’s hits across love and violence; the rest is just narrative padding. It counts on our relationship with music and lyrics past, even though the original songs — like ‘Ve Junoon’ and ‘Yeh Awarapan’ — do well to cultivate some Saiyaara-coded soil.

आज अक्खा बॉलीवुड को एक तरफ रखने वाले इमरान हाशमी जब ‘मर्डर’, ‘जहर’, ‘आशिक बनाया आपने’ और ‘गैंगस्टर’ जैसी फिल्मों के बाद अपनी ‘सीरियल किसर’ वाली इमेज से तंग थे, तब 2007 में एक रूहानी आशिक के आवारापन की कहानी से उनकी यह छवि तोड़ी थी। उनकी ‘आवारापन’ तब बॉक्स ऑफिस पर तो नहीं चला, लेकिन ‘तेरा मेरा रिश्ता’ और ‘तो फिर आओ’ जैसे गानों की बदौलत बाद में ‘कल्ट कलासिक’ का दर्जा पा गई। अब 19 साल बाद भट्ट कैंप उसके सीक्वल ‘आवारापन 2’ से उसी नॉस्‍टैल्जिया को भुनाने चला है, मगर शिवम पंडित के रूप में इमरान हाशमी की दमदार वापसी के बावजूद फिल्म बेअसर साबित होती है।