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.

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.

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

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

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.