Omerta

Omar Sheikh, the terrorist who was behind 26/11 and the man who cunningly brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war, you would think would be someone who would stoke passions to such an extent that a cut and dry film on him would sound and look misplaced.

Omerta, a loose biopic of this Pakistan-based top terrorist who was one of the three men freed in a hijack deal during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s regime, gives an uncomfortably placid account of how an LSE aspirant from an upmarket London household gets into the terror network, trains in PoK and unleashes big-time events in India and Pakistan, thereby giving America a bed of thorns.

But why he chooses India as his target when he should have been on a Bosnian chant is one of the things Hansal Mehta fails to explain, alongside an undercooked childhood story and a wishy-washy father-son relationship.

Rajkummar Rao, who has perfected himself in playing complex common man roles, despite looking a little diminutive for a tall Omar, captures the essence of his personality and his growth into radicalism and terror.

He is brilliant as a smiling assassin throughout the film and covers well his anger over atrocities on Muslims with a friendly boy next door person. The murderous look on his face when he carries out the inhuman execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, explain what Omar is really all about behind the suave veneer of a well-read Londoner.

Hansal, who gave us Shahid earlier to maximum affect, is rather cloak and dagger with Omerta. He cloaks the biopic in splashes of the documentary genre and is just too matter of fact about the explosive man he portrays.

You could call it his cleverness that he manages to dodge the Censor scissors despite throwing around the Kashmir issue, talking about Kashmiri youth going over to Pakistan and even deigning to discuss “Hindu atrocities”.

Overall, however, the film is a tad slow. But then Hansal prefers to stick to the bare truth and he tells it to you with minimum fuss, using the brilliance of Rajkummar Rao to throw menace, seething rage, cruelty, atrocity and political chicanery at you without covering anything up.

That’s why you should go for this one too. 

Source: The Pioneer, 6 May, 2018