Cast: Shraddha Kapoor, Siddhanth Kapoor, Ankur Bhatia, Rajesh Tailang

Direction: Apoorva Lakhia

Producer: Nahid Khan

Writer: Suresh Nair'

Genre: Biography

Duration: 124 Mins*

We are living in a world of Netflix and Hotstar, but do you remember the sound your TV used to make when the cable went off? That's the exact dilemma is your mind in while watching Haseena Parker. I suggest please shut the tv (read: mind) off.

While there have been many movies where the protagonist is a ruthless female who has suffered long enough and now needs justice, the audience sympathizes with her. Some of the female villain protagonists have gained lots of hatred but respect like Cersei Baratheon in Game of Thrones, Ursula in The Little Mermaid and Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter. Point being we cannot sympathize nor respect Haseena played by Shraddha Kapoor, we can only sit back and cringe.

The thought the movie wants to provoke is ‘how the family of a criminal is affected by his/her deeds’. Haseena Parker was known to run proxy business for her brother Dawood Ibrahim who was seated in a palatial mansion in Dubai. The movie showcases a courtroom drama where Haseena is presenting her side of the story, we go back and forth between the past and the present quite often. It shows all the major events of how Dawood Ibrahim became the most fearful Don of Mumbai which led to his exile to Dubai and Haseena Parker's rise to the chair.

The film lacks direction as well as the convincing storyline. The poor performance by Shraddha Kapoor makes it a bad experience in its entirety. In the later stages of the movie, where there's a need to show Haseena Parker plump, Shraddha Kapoor looks like she has something stuffed in her mouth (maybe a paan?) that's making her speak deliberately slow to the point where the audience is wishing that she doesn't have any more dialogues. The film has more sensation than substance. The screenplay takes us through headline-making events: the shooting of Dawood’s brother Sabir Kaskar, the JJ Hospital shoot-out, the riots of 1992 and the ensuing bomb blasts of 1993 of which Haseena Parker was a suspect too.

The gore action sequences and no care for period drama, Shraddha isn't the weakest link of the film. From Dubai to Nagpada, all look the same. If you know the story of Haseena Parker's controversial life, you would want to understand the sequence of events and why she did what she did. Here most of her crime are justified for reasons beyond logic. She who killed many is victimised in the courtroom and the lawyer fighting against her is barely making any points to win his case.

Being a biopic, we cannot understand the depth of Haseena Parker's personality, the film is a jarring conjoined version of the shootouts and bomb blast and it fails miserably. There's not much to take home from this movie, except to think twice about going to the theatres and catching a movie.