Project Ghazi - Movie Review (1/5 Stars)

By Hamza Shafique (Instagram / Facebook)

Project Ghazi is a clear example of gap between ambition/idea and capabilities/resources/experience. 8 crore rupees is a good budget for a Pakistani film but makers' lack of experience of this genre make this project appear kind of a low budget school project.

Incoherent narrative, poor direction, unconvincing writing and inconsistent visual representation are some of the issues with this production but as an audience I could have let those go if they had gotten one fundamental element of this superhero film right - The Action sequences. This is where one can actually see that how makers lacked resources, talent and expertise to make it engaging and thrilling. Otherwise there is enough scope and potential even in this rather immature screenplay. Action sequences always have a storyline of their own and one needs to connect with it, forexample in last action sequence we are not narrated about the plan first, like how our protagonist will approach the situation which in itself wasn't clear for the audience and then on top of that everyone keeps going in to the fight and at what point character of Zara says I am in and we as an audience are like everything is undercontrol already why are you going in, for what reason, you are a scientist not black widow (from marvel) and one could hear sarcastic laughs from the audience at such points.

What Nadir Shah's direction and Ali Raza's writing fails to do in the first 30 minutes is establish a clear motive of villain and also establish storyline of protagonist as well, so as an audience one really has no idea on what's happening on screen.
On top of that it's misleading as well, like in one scene we see Scientist Zara played by Syra Sheroze is testing abilities of Major Zain played by Shehryar Munawar and says , let's see what you got, usually in such movies after that ,we get to see a montage displaying super human elements of the hero but here we just see him running like a regular human being and the very next scene moves to a totally different part with in a second, if you were not going to show us what he got then why writers wrote such dialogues.

Transition between scenes is also abrupt and random it feel like you are watching couple of scenes with no connection, editing was all over the place.
Background score was also not making sense , it gets intense for no reason and then where intensity is required it stays flat.By the time we get "yeh watan tumahara hai ", you dont feel anything infact it gets embarrassing in a way and I got alot of sarcastic laughs from the audience here as well.
At one point in movie some one says "
You have potential but you cant do any thing" and that's exactly how I felt after the film, we first need to develop story telling capabilities of this genre and then should do something otherwise world is full of much better Marvel and DC movies. My sister after the movie said , "all the people in cinema are the real Ghazis (survivors) as we stayed till the very end, through this otherwise tormenting ordeal".

 I go with 1 star only because of the lead cast as they had conviction ( which also became laughable at somepoint - thanks to narrative) and acted/looked the part they were playing but unfortunately it wasnt enough to save this project.