Awarapan 2

There is something about watching Emraan Hashmi on the big screen. Whether he has short hair or long hair, the camera seems to love him, and he has that rare intensity that makes you want to keep watching. Awarapan 2 works largely because of him. The film begins with Shivam (Emraan Hashmi) finding an abandoned little girl in a graveyard. This leads him to fight a child trafficking racket in Bangkok. It’s a fairly straightforward action drama, and strangely, it feels like a film from the era when Awarapan originally released in 2007. But somehow, it works.

Nearly two decades after dying quite unambiguously at the end of the 2007 release Awarapan — they even held a memorial for him (in Pakistan!) — the ‘selfless angel’ of a gangster Shivam Pandit (played by Emraan Hashmi) is back in Awarapan 2. The new movie is designed almost exclusively for Hashmi’s cult fanbase and the odd passer-by with nothing better to do at the multiplex. Remember, the first Awarapan was a flop; it gained a following thanks to multiple reruns on cable and Pritam’s evergreen music album. This time around, directing duties have been handed over to Nitin Kakkar, who simply doesn’t have the command over such material that original filmmaker Mohit Suri did.

Shivam Pandit, the straggly-haired shooter with a golden heart, is back. And it would seem, miraculously, that nothing much has changed between the 2007 Awarapan and this sequel, which doesn’t stray far from the thematic palette of the original, keeping the lead actor intact. It’s yesterday once more. Emraan Hashmi is clearly older. But his hair is as straggly. He is as much a wounded hero, a role Hashmi owns, as he was back in the day. And he is as lethal, which is a good thing because he is up against a new set of mobsters, gun-toting henchmen, helpless young women, as he goes about looking for a little girl in the clutches of a gang of human traffickers.

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।