WAGAH MOVIE REVIEW

Plot

Wagah is a cross-border romance film where an Indian BSF Jawan placed at Wagah, falls in love with a Pakistani girl who comes to a village in India near Wagah to visit her grandfather. At one point India becomes unsafe for Pakistanis and the female protagonist is asked to return to her home nation but her home is not going to be easy as Pakistanis are being butchered by few anti-social groups near the border and that is when our hero lends his support. Rest of the story is how an illegal Indian immigrant is being treated in Pakistan and will the hero find his way back home and also succeed in his love.

Cast

Vikram Prabhu wears his action garb with consummate elegance. The fight scenes are captured and choreographed well. But on the flipside neither did his comedy portion nor his love scenes work. Ranya Rao looks pretty but she needs to brush up on her acting skills. No other artists made an impact.

Direction & Screenplay

The problem with Wagah is that it does not focus on one particular subject. It shifts base, time and again from family sentiment, comedy, romance and border issue. Just when the story starts to move forward in the later part of the first half, the movie starts faltering in a big way. The love portions were underwhelming and could have been handled better. The dialogues, especially the ones in the pre-climax portion are outdated to the core. The film is based out of Wagah, so you have multiple lingual people involved in it. The director has made everyone speak in Tamil irrespective of the country or state they come from, instead of giving Tamil voice over to a Hindi or Punjabi dialogues. This has made things even more confusing - What language is Vikram Prabhu communicating in with a Pakistani girl? Why should the Pakistanis in the film speak in broken fake Tamil? All these factors made the film look very artificial.

Technical

Though all the songs are passable, Imman makes it up for it with the background scores. His re-recording is the biggest plus for the film. It looked like he wanted to do a patriotic film for a while and finally when got an opportunity, he used it to the fullest. SR Sathish Kumar’s cinematography was good but it could have been better - Kashmir has a lot more beautiful place than what was shown.

Conclusion

Wagah is neither a patriotic film nor a love film, it is somewhere in between. A cross-border romance script like this demands a more focused approach.