I’m going with zero out of five, for the new ‘Zanjeer’. Without belittling their year-long battle with the film’s makers to be compensated for remaking their script, one has to wonder if screenwriters Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar might consider donating some part of their settlement towards admitting these guys in film school.

The filmmakers have been carefully calling it a “tribute”, and they have added a couple of elements which weren’t in the older film, but to me it was a neither here-nor-there thing: it’s neither faithful remake nor campy, knowing tribute. It’s just a poor copy. So why?

Zanjeer is an unwarranted, atrocious remake.

Zanjeer doesn’t hold a candle to the original, instead it feels like a modern day adaptation of a yet another cop drama.

Zanjeer is a typical product of prevalent market tricks that ensure numbers. A sloppy mishmash of slackened writing, half baked execution and slumber incurring editing, the desperate attempts of packing a few extra scenes of head banging action doesn’t quite help. Lacking the spirit and marvel of Zanjeer that I went in looking, the reason why I both survived and detested the film, was the same.

I can understand Fermat’s last theorem but why on earth was this film remade, remains a mystery. But then when remakes of films like Agneepath can cross Rs.100 crores, I guess the temptation for producers is too hard to resist, creativity be damned.

It’s hard though when you’re constantly made aware that these loose, sometimes fully disjointed pieces of a zanjeer (series of events) – with several unexplained and missing scenes — is the reinterpretation of the 1973 classic

The film is a failed attempt at remake. Watch it for the love of item songs and action-drama.

In this distressing time of remakes and hand-me-down inspirations, let’s remember Herman Melville, “It is better to fail at originality than to succeed in imitation.” Zanjeer manages neither.