How do you pick up such a ripe-for-satire-but-potentially-dangerous concept, make a feature-length movie out of it and still manage to tread the line carefully, without offending any parties or impairing your creative vision & movie? Don’t ask me – I honestly couldn’t tell you.
And after seeing Tere Bin Laden, it seems you like you shouldn’t ask writer-director Abhishek Sharma either: The man has just about no clue how to stretch this gag out to occupy an entire film, keep it thematically relevant & resonant, while at the same time never losing track of the characters or laughs.
Make no mistake, this film is in no way the subversive political satire it has been made out to be. It is far too slight and diffuse to leave any good aftertaste. It’s a thematically & structurally muddled film that’s frustrating to watch, difficult to enjoy and near-impossible to recommend. A stark disappointment.
Tere Bin Laden is set in Karachi and tells the story of Ali Hassan (played by Ali Zafar), a journalist working for a downmarket channel called Danka TV, who is enamoured with the US and is determined to live there. Unfortunately, due to something he once did on a flight, his visa has been rejected six times in the last seven years. After he’s told that the best chance he has of travelling to the US is by getting a fake passport made (a very costly process), Ali sets out to somehow gather all that money. By sheer chance, he spots Noora (played by Pradhuman Singh), a simpleton who bears more than a passing resemblance to Osama Bin Laden. Ali cooks up a plan of getting Noora to pose as Osama, record a message for America… a message he intends to sell so as to earn the much-needed cash. But, as they are wont to do, things don’t turn out as expected and soon Ali is embroiled in something that’s much bigger than what he had bargained for.
This image sums up the film's premise just about perfectly.
I’ll say this: Tere Bin Laden starts strongly. And by “start”, I’m referring to the entire first half. The world of the characters and the characters themselves are set up extremely well. The pacing is brisk and there’s a brevity to proceedings that’s charming. The “training” of Noora, the recording of the video & its handoff are deftly-handled sequences that had me hoping for something sublime.
But unfortunately, after the intermission, things go downhill depressingly fast. Not only does the plot undergo a radical shift, but the tone of the movie changes drastically too. The crispness noted earlier is replaced by scenes that are both heavy and amateurishly handled. Moreover, vehement criticism should be meted out to the filmmakers just for the way they depicted the “Intelligence” Bureaus that chase our protagonists. Granted, the movie throws believability out of the window in a scene inside an airplane right at the beginning, and it works into the movie’s satirical overtones to depict the Secret Agents as bumbling idiots… but it could’ve – and should’ve – been portrayed more adeptly.
And the end of the film seems determined to undo just about any remaining goodwill we might have still had. Where the second act of the film plodded along unhurriedly (and in dire need of a trim), the third act rushes through at the risk of losing all impact. The resolution, in particular, would’ve fared monumentally better if it had been a few minutes longer. All that said, the preceding scenes’ patience-testing nature had made me so restless that I was just glad the film ended when it did. The major part (whole?) of the blame for the messy outline must go to the man who wrote and directed all this: Abhishek Sharma.
Moving on to the cast, almost everyone does good work: The problem’s not with the actors, but with the characters. This is the first time I’ve seen Ali Zafar in anything and he definitely has a palpable screen presence. He has to carry the film on his shoulders, which is no mean task, but Zafar doesn’t disappoint. Nikhil Ratnaparkhi, Sugandha Garg and Rahul Singh as the other conspirators also do decent jobs, but then, they hardly have any challenging work to do. The standout of the ensemble is Pradhuman Singh as Noora/Osama bin Laden. He does look eerily similar to the Most Wanted Man on Earth but that’s only half the requirement. As Noora, Singh convincingly etches the portrait of an awkward, harmless and lovable person. Kudos to him.
I’m pretty sure Abhishek Sharma had a specific goal in mind when he set out to make Tere Bin Laden. Who knows, with some minor tinkering, this could have ended up as an entertaining comedy-with-smarts. But, in its present (and final) incarnation, it’s an irritating letdown.
(1.5/4)
PS – I was originally going to go with just one star, but there’s a splendid American Beauty joke here that forced me to add half a star.
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Photo Credit: Walkwater Media
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