Hansal Mehta’s Omerta, starring Rajkummar Rao, is a surprisingly passion-less, rote incident-by-incident telling of the story of a man who is part of one of the most shameful chapters in India’s terror history.

Omerta is an honourable film, but it often looses track of itself as it goes off on tangents so obscure and weak.

Ultimately his portrait of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh inspires neither fear nor disdain. It leaves you empty and wondering as to what drew Mehta to this guy in the first place.

It’s a shame really that Omerta lacks depth, never giving an insight into Omar’s criminal designs. As a thriller, it’s pacy and yet, distinctly half-baked and stiff. I assure you, this movie could be about one of most dreaded men of our times but this film tells us nothing about the man that a quick google search wouldn’t. As for Rao, a friend rightly puts it – He was good even in Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana; what’s special about this then?

The word ‘Omerta’ means a code of silence that members of crime groups adopt when caught by the law. This film shows us how Omar was happy to kill in the name of religion. The staccato storytelling style and the constant shift between past and present is distracting at best. Unfortunately there is no emotional takeaway from the story, so you watch the stabbings and the kidnappings wondering ‘what was that?’