Shivaay Full Movie Review: Dragging in search of an end

You would be left wondering for nearly three hours if anyone would want to make a film like this. This is truly Ajay Devgn’s Himalayan blunder. Just watching a few scenes characters shedding tears you are tempted to believe are they captured while they were seeing rushes of the film.

In fact, a child in the sparsely seated theatre cried loudly and I wondered if it was a case of the child asking about the Emperor’s new clothes. Tiringly and disgustingly long the action-thriller takes too much for granted. Agonisingly told with a speed that is conspicuous for lack of it and for lack of direction. You could yawn your way through or just sit to supreme boredom with total resignation. The choice is entirely yours.

Shivaay (Ajay Devgn) is that hookah dragging brave heart in the Himalayas who is saving people with his dare devilry when he is not conducting trekking tours. On one such tour the team are confronted with avalanche which becomes the whirlwind of his life. He saves a member of the team Olga (Erica Karr).

In a revisit to the ‘Roop tera Mastana’ scenario, the lady is pregnant and the mother to be. She sees sense and declares that though she loves Shivaay the relationship has no future. She has to return to Bulgaria and he cannot leave the Himalayas. She tries to tell him that abortion is the only sensible road ahead. He vetoes it. Nine years later, when his mute daughter realises that she has a mother tucked away in another part of the globe, she insists on making a trip searching for the mother who left her behind. Thus, the two leave for Bulgaria in search of Olga. Things take a turn for the worse when Shivaay cannot only not finds his wife but also sees his daughter being kidnapped.

From this stage, the entire film is hijacked by the person who is incharge of the stunts and action. There’s nothing content-wise, but chases and gun shots and fights and car crashes as the desperate father fights hard to save his daughter from being a prospective victim of trafficking. When you think that he has finally saved her you have a fresh serving of another bout of long violence where Shivaay outdoes the magic of a Rajnikanth. You shake your head in total disbelief and by now at the end of your patience and even relieved that it is all over. Wait a minute, it is not yet! Then we have a suggestive battle for custody of the child between Olga who has screamed her way back into the script and the ever-brooding Shivaay supported by local lass in waiting Anushka (SayyeshaSaigal). Just when you are about to say: I couldn’t care less, the filmmaker takes the much delayed bow and the film (and with it the agony) comes to an end.

Ajay has lost the plot. It is simply incomprehensible that so much of effort has been put into a script that begs for sanity and relevance. In fact, for a good part of the film the script goes missing as does entertainment or curiosity. Only cinematography and action keeps the film going, or it would be the audience going - going out with promptitude.

Ajay as usual is brooding eternally, even when in love. He has the signature expression that by now can be patented for consistency. None in the cast impress. Olga and the rest are shouting their lungs out without reason.

Cast : Ajay Devgn, Erika Kaar, Abigail Eames
Direction : Ajay Devgn
Genre : Action-thriller
Good : Cinematography and action
Bad : Unbearably and irrelevantly long
Rating : 2