A Shah-‘i’ flop

Most of you will read the headline and start despising me for being another one of those non-patriotic, Pakistan-hating lads who are ignorant and do not want to highlight any positives of the country, focusing instead on the negativities. Well, to tell you the truth, there is a way of bringing to light the brighter side of anything.

In this case, Shah the movie, a biopic on one of the greatest Pakistani boxers, Syed Hussain Shah, is for me one of the biggest upsets that is threatening to derail the revival of local cinema. Since the inception of this idea, ‘the revival of Pakistani cinema’, I haven’t seen a single movie made outside the two already tried and tested genres, namely propaganda and comedy.

I acknowledge that revival may require our cinema to first stand on strong monetary foundations and for that these two formulas work best, but what about the aesthetic foundations? Pakistan has given a country like India a tough time when it comes to TV dramas, which rely mostly on the aesthetic quality of the storyline but I am not able to see any of that in our movies. Either the plot is too simple or it is too complex to digest.

Meanwhile, Shah tried to jump out of the box and worked on a very new concept — if we talk about Pakistan, specifically — a biography on a forgotten hero. But whether it was the lack of funds or resources, the movie in no way did justice to the concept and to the hero himself.

The production values were pathetic to say the least. Sound and light jumps, no proper storyline to follow, lack of punch lines which are the main essence of a biopic, everything was off about the movie.

Here, I do not necessarily want to find fault with the movie’s production team only; it is the combined failure of the entire film industry, which has not invested anything, not even time or ideas, during the making of a movie that could have been an exceptional biopic.

I wish Shah had lived up to the expectations of the cinema audience, but instead of cheers, the only thing I could hear were boos from the crowd.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 24^th, 2015.