Critics rating : 2 Stars

Cast :  Aishwarya Rai, Irrfan Khan, Shabana Azmi.

Direction : Sanjay Gupta

Produced : Sanjay Gupta, Aishwarya Rai, Anuradha Gupta, Nittin Keni, Akash Chawla, Sachin R. Joshi, Raina Sachin R. Joshi.

Written : Sanjay Gupta, Robin Bhatt

Genre : Drama.

Duration : 130 Mins

You do not need to hit up Wiki to know that Jazbaa is about a harried lawyer who must steer a convicted rapist away from the death penalty in order to save her daughter who has been kidnapped. What you do need to know (if you do not already) is that Jazbaa is based on Shin-yeon Won’s Korean film, Seven Days (Se-Beun De-I-Jeu). ‘Based’ is putting it mildly.

The frantic editing and thrilling car chase which opens the original, wastes no time in establishing the situation – there is a mother, a kidnapped daughter and a mysterious voice giving her instructions to lose the cops. She obviously fails, which leads to the kidnapper calling her again and giving her a second chance. No ransom money needed. Just an innocent man to be set free.
Jazbaa does not open with a bang, choosing instead a more linear narrative which introduces lawyer Anuradha Verma (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) as a workaholic lawyer and a doting mother who banters with her friend, the suspended-for-corruption top cop, Inspector Yohaan (Irrfan Khan). Yohaan may have the best wisecracks in the movie, but Anuradha doles out her share of punches in the courtroom like the scene where she meets the prosecution lawyer (Atul Kulkarni) for a client she is defending. “Kuch khel kar aaye hue ho? Haare hue lag rahe ho,” she says. Other than these asides, Jazbaa sticks faithfully to the original, right down to the scene flow and retaining the dialogue from the source.

Her personal calamity hits when her daughter is whisked off by the kidnapper during a school’s parent-child relay race. Things get murky from there, much like the green overcast sky, which occasionally switches to dull orange, like an Instagram enthusiast’s fantasy. Anuradha is forced to defend serial rapist Niyaaz (Chandan Roy Sanyal), accused of raping and murdering bohemian artist Sia (Priya Banerjee). Her mother Garima (Shabana Azmi) wants Niyaaz behind bars and quite strangely, cannot recognise the high-profile Anuradha when she comes to question her, posing as another victim’s sister.
There are implausible sequences (also in the original) like when Anuradha breaks into Sia’s house to access her laptop for clues. Surely the laptop was an important piece of evidence the police would have kept in their custody for a subjudice matter? The evacuation scene in the mental asylum is an example of how not to vacate the premises during a blaring fire alarm.
Jazbaa tries hard to maintain the thriller tempo by toeing the line Seven Days has drawn for it. Therein lies the problem. Jazbaa seems like a check-list of one rushed scene after another from the original, which it mistakes for pacy writing. Despite the quick progression of scenes, Jazbaa gets stuck in a rut with Anuradha’s prolonged hysteria and the repetitive recreation of the night Sia was murdered.

The film falters even more when it deviates from the original script by inserting social messages pertaining to female infanticide and the audacity to rape a woman with non-conformist lifestyle choices. Jazbaa even ends with statistics of women’s rapes in India, which does not fit into the race-against-time, saving-the-daughter and winning-the-case narrative.
The film had the potential to be a great adaptation of an average Korean thriller. However, the makers did not own the existing universe or change it… they merely imitated it. That is the unfortunate undoing of what could have been a great comeback vehicle for our leading lady. The performances, the setting and the swampy green filter do Jazbaa no favours. Whether or not you have seen Seven Days, Jazbaa is unlikely to deliver on the thrill quotient.