JANNAT – POWER PLAY, GREED, LOVE

Movies based on religion are quite frequent in Bollywood. Jannat involves a completely different religion – Cricket. The spirit and emotion involved in cricket should pep up any viewer. But Jannat focuses on a completely different part of Cricket, a dark part, in fact Cricket’s shame one can say.

Anyway shifting focus to the movie, Jannat has all the ingredients for a successful movie. A match fixer’s life should be intriguing and suspense filled. But the heart of the tale is a dark tragic love story 2008. But one finds that the movie fails to keep you glued to the screen unlike Bhatt’s previous movies. The movie tends to sag a bit in the second half.

Jannat, as the name suggests is a tale of a man who is in search of heaven on the Earth. Arjun, a young man obsessed with small time card games, meets a girl, Zoya and falls in love. He soon decides to make money in double quick time and becomes a bookie. Soon he becomes a cynosure and attracts the police as well. Arjun struggles to balance his love life and his mafia dealings. At one stage, the Don makes Arjun an undeniable offer promising money with no boundaries. What Arjun does finally to save his love life and how he deals the Mafia and the omnipresent police men forms the rest of the tale.

Emraan as Arjun fits the bill in a refreshingly different role. But one feels that the role could have been done with more suave and style. The movie mixes cricket footage to pep up the audience and deals reasonably well with the often complicated human relationship. The movie is picking up inspite of some discouraging reports. It has been reported that the collection on the first day was around 90 percent all over India. So things are looking up for Mukesh Bhatt.