This could have been a great cautionary tale about a great sport at a time when it was just becoming the arena it has grown into—full of big money and glamour, bigger endorsements and never-ending temptations : it is, instead, an inept ‘tamasha’, not very different from the stuff Bollywood churns out, the cricket just the superstructure for tired song-and-dance and melodrama, in living rooms and court-rooms. Nope, this ‘Azhar’ doesn’t hit it out of the stadium.

As a work of fan-fiction, Azhar is a mostly watchable film with a solid lead, but falls far short of being either entertaining, insightful, or worthy of recommendation. Hashmi and D’Souza try hard, and their effort shows.

I just wish I could have said the boys played well.

The Emraan Hashmi charm mixed with shy Azharuddin mannerism makes it a heady cocktail. You wouldn’t want to put it down without giving it a try.

Too late even for a late night show, this one should have hit the theatres a decade ago. It would have made sense then. Now, it will drown in the next trending troll on Twitter. Even on Facebook. Like cricket, fixing has now become an art. Planners book five-star hotels to cast their net, divide matches as if they are planning high-sea fishing (each must have his own zone of catch). You have to be bloody realistic — like Blood Diamond — to make something like this going.

A good story but a decade late…The movie has its sparks but very few.

It is at its heart the story of innocence lost — the innocence of Azhar, the innocence of unnumbered fans who invested in his magic, the innocence of a sport that had shed its shady origins and reinvented itself as ‘the gentleman’s game’. And it is this that makes the story of Azhar a natural for a biopic.

What we get, instead, is a fanpic — a bland, badly-set soufflé of Bollywood tropes without a soul.

You stay invested here because the material at hand combines India’s two religions-cricket and films. Of course, this generation would rather see biopics on MS Dhoni or Virat Kohli.

“Azhar” is an unmitigated disaster only because of its relentless idolization of an obviously flawed man. A more subtle, honest and casual admission of the cricketer’s repeated lapses in judgments would perhaps have made him look less greedy, and more deserving of sympathy and forgiveness.

Whether you’re a cricket fan or not, Azhar will keep you glued to the seat. Go for it.

In all, this Tony D’Souza film works solely because of Emraan Hashmi. The actor pours in his heart and soul into playing Azhar, being Azhar.

Azhar is a complete misfiled. It neither captures the spirit of the game nor the personality.

AZHAR is a highly engaging piece of cinema that grips you completely and keeps you guessing. The story telling is objective as it shows both sides of the coin. You are simultaneously treated to the arguments for and against the verdict on Azhar’s personal and public upheavals. You are also made to come across a fiercely hungry actor in Emraan Hashmi who simply grabs you by your eyeballs and compels you to witness his masterful knock!

AZHAR is a superlative watching experience. Don’t miss it for anything!

Azhar’s is an intriguing story, if only the film was as engaging.

Director Tony D’Souza’s Azhar is a vanilla look at a story that could’ve been both riveting and hard hitting. In stead of presenting Mohammed Azharuddin as a man of many contradictions and supreme talent, it portrays him as a victim and stoic person. In a classic example of bad taste, the film also casts moral aspersions on other cricketers but projects Azhar as a righteous hero.  It’s the oldest trick in the book to gain sympathy. Sadly, it’s just not good enough.

What a pity, though. Azhar could honestly have been a great biopic, even within its own self-imposed limitations. Instead, like Azharuddin, it chooses to ignore its own potential and thereby shoots itself in the foot.

‘Azhar’ is clearly made as an attempt at redemption for the tainted cricketer and India’s ex-captain Mohammad Azharuddin. Unfortunately, you walk out of the theatre with no emotions, no sympathy, except for remorse at having wasted another two hours of your life on a strictly mediocre film.

Azhar is not an apologetic bio-pic. It doesn’t try too hard to portray the fallen hero as a  victim. The director lets the story tell itself out in the hope that the truth will emerge in the process.

It does. To a point.

Sports drama ‘Chak De India’ had brilliantly captured the politics of hockey on-field and off it, unfortunately ‘Azhar’ refrains from doing either. It remains, but sadly a story of a fallen hero, “fixed” Bollywood style.

Azhar is a superficial look at the life of one of the most enigmatic and intriguing sporting stars this country has ever seen. It is an opportunity lost.

It’s a brave but pointless attempt to make a fallen star look less fallen. Is there such a thing? The film claims it to be a work of fiction, and manages to make it such a drag, you wonder why they would try and convince people that there was righteous innocence in a game known to be tainted by money.

This movie appears instead as some sort of a long explanation to the world, delivered by the corny looking Emraan Hashmi, on behalf of Azhar, setting the record straight—if not on the match fixing scandal, then on his extra-marital affair with a Bollywood actor of the time, Sangeeta Bijlani (Nargis Fakhri), and his first wife (Prachi Desai) adding to the over-the-top sob opera. Now really who cares? Okay, I hope for the filmmakers, plenty do.

The ghost of match-fixing and the allegations run across the run-time, and what exactly a player goes through if he’s innocent is what ‘Azhar’ summarises. Go, watch it for the love of cricket!

Watch it if you too are curious about the the story of the once-celebrated captain of the Indian cricket team who only seconds M.S.Dhoni in being the most successful. It will be hard to miss this as one of Hashmi’s better performances.

Like last year’s Talwar, the movie should have left the decision for the audiences to make whether Azhar was the wronged one or not. However, the makers lacked the guts to do so, making this a totally one sided match. But kudos to Emraan Hashmi who makes the proceedings believable!

Even if Azhar wasn’t so sketchily written and the cricket scenes weren’t so tacky, this would be a tall order. The makers might have been better off trying to explain how he pulled off those impossible leg glances rather than how he took (but didn’t actually take) money to throw matches.

Director Tony D’Souza chooses to tell the story over different timelines, but the flitting isn’t as smooth as it should have been. The film moves on from the match-fixing allegations to the case being fought in court. There is an attempt to showcase the grey shades of the central character, but the film majorly cops-out in the end.

A problem with this film is that it won’t agree well with ardent Azhar fans, given the slips in factual accuracy. And his detractors would argue against his engineered victim image in the film. So the point is, who does that leave Azhar with?

This one is strictly for die-hard Azharuddin fans, or those looking for some ’90s cricket nostalgia.

Azhar lacks spine. It is evident in the long disclaimer preceding the film in which the team seems to be making a claim on cricketer Mohammad Azharuddin’s colourful and controversial life as a source material yet maintaining that it is a fictional account. All to escape the legal battles the film could land them in.

If you are expecting Hashmi to deliver a captain’s innings here, then you are looking up the wrong film. However, if you are in the mood for a salacious potboiler that buries the real problem then Azhar may work for you.

Overall, Azhar, despite its flaws and inconsistencies, proves to be an engaging cinematic experience. How it succeeds in weaving together different genres is quite commendable.

This Emraan Hashmi starrer will please Mohammad Azharuddin but may disappoint Chetan Bhagat!

The film is all about the controversial life of former Indian cricket captain Mohammad Azharuddin. The movie showcases Azharuddin’s life, how he grew from a normal man to a famous cricketer by setting back-to-back records in the history of Cricket ever!

Azhar could have been bad-ass, controversial, exciting, masaledaar… alas the simplistic safe treatment leaves it pretty bland.

This is one of those films you can watch because your wife wants a tub of popcorn and you want an outing to shush a domestic crisis. But for Azhar’s lovers or even film buffs, the film is an opportunity lost. It is watchable, despite the corny, over-the-top dialogues, but never becomes a fitting tribute to a fallen hero. At no point will you feel Azhar’s hurt or frustration. Yes, the one thing it will surely make you do is rewatch his old matches. In there lies a better story than the one Emraan plays out on screen.

Tony D’Souza’s film about Mohammed Azharuddin plays out like an episode from the TV show ‘CID’.

The only interesting part of the film is the songs. Azhar basically is the output of poor screenplay, one sided direction, weak dialogues, and fictionalized reality. It’s a mess pot backed by scintillating music.

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