Mohenjo daro: An expansive waste

Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Pooja Hegde, Kabir Bedi, Nitish Bharadwaj, Arunoday Singh, Suhasini Mulay

Rated: 4/10

If there was ever an expansive, expensive, grand and kingsize waste on the big screen it is Mohenjo Daro. The grandeur is always a given in any Ashutosh Gowarikar film and this one was no exception.  Big star, sets that can take your breath away and action sequences reeking of CGIs are all there and in good style. But that’s that.

Beyond the empty grandeur, there’s nothing more in the film and even the star power of a Hrithik Roshan dancing and fighting his way through river tsunamis, old-time power games, court intrigues and, of course romance, fails to lift up this empty love story set in the times of an ancient civilisation on which we have grown up through school textbooks.

If it was meant to be a romance, there is zero chemistry between Hrithik and his delightfully beautiful leading lady Pooja Hegde. If it was about an ancient power struggle, despite Kabir Bedi’s swollen eyelids which are meant to threaten but merely suggest a hangover, there is hardly any believable menace that Gowarikar manages to stitch up, despite oddities like narbhakshis. If it was about Mohenjo Daro, well, suffice it to say it could as well been 2016 AD instead of the projected 2016 BC so divorced it is from anything credible to do with that civilisation. Mere shell-and-feather headgears, tribal clothing and the symbolic ‘dancing girl’ floating alongside the credits do not make for a civilisational depiction Mr Gowarikar.

In fact, he trivialises the entire era telling you things you never knew about this much documented but yet to be fully deciphered civilisation simply because they are not true. There are Rome-type feasts in which dressed chicken, pork and beef legs dangle out of unending tables, there is a lot of ‘shukran’ floating around to suggest a Persian influence! ‘Sapna’ is sapina (dream) and ‘thanks a lot’ is lukh lukh thukran! Was it a kid’s show by any chance because that’s kind of cute?

These and many other digressions could have been ignored if there was an interesting story to all this, fictitious or otherwise tapestry. There is no story, no plot, no nothing. There are only those delectable aerial shots and Gowarikar’s single-mindedness to look good on screen. Hrithik Roshan, despite his earthy unkemptness, looks just out of a Jawed Habib parlour with all his perfectly tousled curls and streaks, not to mention his Khadiline apparels which were perhaps the only thing that suited a farmer’s existence.

What a waste of time, energy, money and skills!  

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 14 August, 2016