‘Jannat’ is an engrossing, touching tale of an intuitively gifted bookie who loses his love in pursuit of his idea of heaven.
Arjun ( Emraan Hashmi ) comes from a middle-class family, but his dreams are big and he doesn’t mind taking the short route to riches regardless of morality, or the lack of it. He graduates from being a gambler to bookie, solely by the dint of his intuition to predict correctly. He falls in love at first sight with Zoya ( Sonal Chauhan ) and eventually goes on to win her heart, her trust, and her respect with his love and his riches. But when she comes know the source from where the riches come, she hands him over to the cops.

Arjun goes to jail and vows to reform himself – all for the sake of love. But then, one sight of jannat, one last temptation to fix a match, gets the better of his senses. And situations turn around so unexpectedly that he finds himself sinking just when he was about to come ashore.

Like all the Bhatt films, the story of ‘Jannat’ steers clear of the good-versus-bad formula. It is a subject in which both good and bad coexist inside the leading characters. There is no moral message, no sermonizing, but just the poignancy of a tragic love story.

It’s the kind of simplistic storyline that could have been wrapped up in half the time. Honest, you could have rolled end credits at the interval and it wouldn’t make any difference whatsoever to the overall narrative. Sure, there is talk of cricket and match-fixing, but the sport is just a backdrop for Emraan’s platitudes, or slight gimmicks like a dead coach or a cricket captain with a fondness for Rolexes — taking over from US football in the original film. And while it is all surfacially stuck-on, it’s handled deftly enough to keep the film flowing along.

Sonal Chauhan and Emraan Hashmi The supporting cast isn’t bad. Vipin Sharma, poor man, goes incredibly from playing Darsheel Safary’s father in Taare Zameen Par to Hashmi’s dad here and does okay, while Samir Kochar is solidly effective as the cop on the hero’s trail.

Jawed Sheikh makes a good baddie, and is particularly menacing while mixing thick chicory in a cup while sitting on a white sofa set, not least because he might spill some coffee.

Vishal Malhotra, however, plays Arjun’s sidekick and hams with such glee it’s as if he was stabbed with a soap-opera injection.

So while the ‘broke to blood-money’ template doesn’t offer any surprise, Jannat all comes down to the romance. The girl is a callcenter executive who doubles up as a stripper? The guy is a hardcore pro but bawls like a baby to make another bet? It is the unpredictability these two promise that makes Jannat interesting, even if ultimately a bit of a con job. Heaven can wait.

Without doubt the man-of-the-movie trophy goes to Emraan Hashmi – the blue-eyed boy of the Bhatts – who gives a skillfully restrained performance, playing an ambitious man with shaky morals and firm equanimity in the face of success or failure.

Newcomer Sonal Chauhan catches your attention more because of her looks than acting. Samir Kochar is terrific in his role as an Indian cop in Cape Town, on the trail of bookies. Javed Sheikh brings an imposing demeanor to his character of a kingmaker don who takes Emraan under his wing.

The songs by Pritam may not be chartbusters, but they go along well with the mood of the film.

In a nutshell, Jannat is one of the finest films to come out of Vishesh Films. Not to be missed! Arjun [Emraan Hashmi] is a reckless young man with an obsession for making money at card games. A chance meeting with a girl in a mall, Zoya [Sonal Chauhan], gives him the reasons he was looking for to move out of his ordinary life. He steps up from playing small-time card games to becoming a bookie.

On the whole, Jannat is a well-made film with lilting music, gripping script and excellent performances as its mainstay. Coupled with an absorbing second hour and a brilliant climax, the film has all it takes to prove a success story in times to come.

Categories: Jannat, Movie Review
Tags: Emraan Hashmi, Jannat