A Wednesday! (2008) Movie Rating and Review :
Rating :
Acting – 7/10
Direction – 5/10
Screenplay – 3/10
Music – 4/10
Technique – 3/10
Review :
What an idea, but...
They did it to him first on a Friday. And then repeated it all over again on a Tuesday. He got back to them on a Wednesday.
Neeraj Pandey’s directorial debut A Wednesday is that terrific one-line idea that a first-time film-maker gets totally obsessed with. He knows he has this attention-grabbing premise and that hold-your-breath twist in the end and he just has to make it happen. So he starts padding up the rest of the movie. Sometimes you can pull it off as a film, sometimes you are left with what you started — a great little idea.
A Wednesday sadly is the latter. After those terrible first 15 minutes of introducing its primary characters — including a sad hint of how a crank call can get people all sweaty — Neeraj slips in his first trump card — an ordinary 50-something man (Naseeruddin Shah) calls the commissioner of police (Anupam Kher) and tells him that he has planted bombs in many locations in Mumbai. A couple of calls later it’s evident that the man is not fooling around and he wants four dreaded terrorists to be freed before sundown.
And then 90-odd minutes later the other trump card is played — why the nameless, faceless adversary is doing what he is doing. In the middle of the two trump cards, two things happen. First, to justify the end and tie all the strings together, Neeraj introduces one preposterous event after the other. And two, he employs fast cuts and a non-stop high-pitch background score to drown all the loopholes in the garb of relentless pace.
But the holes are so huge they are impossible to miss on any given day. Every police department from the anti-terrorist squad to the bomb-disposal team plus the ministry is involved and yet the police commissioner claims no one knows about the case! And how pray do you explain one news channel showing the events live and no other channel picking it up and the story being hushed up? And why does every member of the police squad behave like sissies when they know the true identity of the caller — in a film that proposes to be a wake-up call for callous cops!
And we aren’t even talking about the way 50-odd cops who are supposed to be tech fiends hammer away at their keyboards. What are they keying in? A film which takes its technology so seriously should at least have an explanation how the local SIM card being intercepted is displaying locations of foreign countries.
You should watch A Wednesday, if you must, for the two thespians on show. Here is another example how mediocre material shines in the hands of the masters. Naseer hardly twitches an eyebrow throughout the film and then simply takes off in the last 10 minutes. His verbal whiplash in the finale is the reason the industry is talking about the film. Anupam plays a very believable top cop who has an answer to every riddle posed by Naseer; someone who’s been there done that but knows he is treading new terrain in this case.
Jimmy and Aamir as the two cops out on the field are good in the little moments they get to play around with. The rest of the cast, led by the irritating Deepal Shaw, is bad enough to remind us that A Wednesday after all is a first film.
It’s way too simplistic, it’s very flawed and it’s got bad junior actors but the other way to look at A Wednesday is that it’s a great little idea with two great actors.
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