India's Most Wanted

You walk out of the film with a swelling sense of pride for the country and its brave men. But you can't help wish the film was intelligently crafted rather than just banking on nationalist fervour.

Known for sharp thrillers such as Aamir and No One Killed Jessica, director Raj Kumar Gupta has set a bar that only few have managed to scale. But, as they say, high expectations inevitably lead to disappointment. Given the compelling material to work with at hand, this could've rendered a cracking, edge-of-the-seat watch. But predictable turns and lack of cinematic liberties fail to infuse the film with much-required tension.

The makers of India's Most Wanted had a compelling subject with them. Unfortunately Raj Kumar Gupta's direction and writing fails to do justice to it and leaves you dry and disappointed instead.

The problem with India's Most Wanted is also its twist. Anyone who has been to Nepal and the places where the film takes you, can already sense there's something amiss. The landmark referred to in one of the film's crucial scenes is a giveaway. So when the twist actually arrives, it is a little too late.

India's Most Wanted is good in parts but those parts are very few. It's a very weak project if you go by the standard of Raj Kumar Gupta; his weakest after Ghanchakkar. Skip it and watch whenever it airs on television or digital space.

India's Most Wanted is kinda fast-paced, a rudimentary thriller with background score guiding your every move, but two hours plus runtime simply appears an hour too long.

It's unbearable, this dullness. You'll find more action in a grocery shop's CCTV footage than in all of India's Most Wanted.

If you're in the mood for a documentary-styled 'real' film, you may find something to take back from here. Having said that, in this case, the intention can be lauded, but definitely not the execution.

India's Most Wanted is a tragic waste of its source material. A real-life chase demanded the bare-knuckled Paul Greengrass, Kathryn Bigelow or Delhi Crime treatment. The feasibility of the story itself is the film. But the language it uses – that of Kabir Khan and Neeraj Pandey spy/action dramas – is more suited to the fetishization of a make-believe genre. Almost as if the director doesn't trust us to understand that capturing terrorists is not a mundane 9-to-5 job. This, however, does sort of explain the coming-of-age soundtrack. Forget finding the bad guys; I hope they found themselves.

...is a very badly scripted and poorly made film with weak performances. It will face complete rejection at the box-office – and deservedly so.

Gupta throws in real-life shots of bomb blasts in India to emphasise the importance of the mission, but they can't match the story's sluggish pace. A deadpan Kapoor is ineffective as a master spy on a mission of a lifetime, putting in an one-tone, monotonous performance as Prabhat that weighs down an already sagging film.

This terrorist manhunt is overheated and undercooked...