Critics’ Verdict: ‘Sarbjit’ Fails to Impress

Find out what critics are saying about Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s new film ‘Sarbjit’

Film: Sarbjit
Director: Omung Kumar
Cast: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Randeep Hooda, Richa Chadha

Excerpts from reviews of Sarbjit:

Omung Kumar is unable to fashion an affecting script out of more than two decades of a family’s futile fight against the political and diplomatic machinery. Instead of a coherent narrative the film feels utterly disjointed, more like a random stringing together of sequences which at times seem have no bearing on each other. So you have Aishwarya Rai as Daljit who is loud, made to scream and shout and weep buckets to show her anguish. But her pain still doesn’t move the viewers. It’s left to Randeep Hooda who plays the titular role, then to make the film watchable. And he tries to give Sarbjit his all.

Namrata Joshi (TheHindu.com)

Omung Kumar’s Sarbjit is a film trapped in no man’s land. Based on a newsy real-life story, it takes cavalier liberties with reality. The result is a disappointment of monumental proportions. Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan is woefully miscast as the dogged sister of the titular character. The script seems more intent on giving the heroine a platform to holler and hector her way though than on crafting a balanced narrative that tracks the impact of Sarabjit’s disappearance on the family as a whole.

Saibal Chatterjee (Movies.Ndtv.com)

There is something fundamentally dishonest about the way director Omung Kumar goes about mainstream biopics. He doesn’t tell stories as much as he narrates - and frantically feeds them to us like an intoxicated puppeteer. One rarely gets a sense of why he is personally so captivated by his subjects, because he never quite rises above the aura of his famous protagonists. Once Sarabjit begins to waste away in solitary confinement, the entire film turns into a giant montage. Dalbir (Aishwarya Rai) becomes a fire-breathing dragon, unable to understand why every scene seems to have been scored and designed to a crescendo as if the interval is just around the corner. It’s not. It never is.

Rahul Desai (Catchnews.com)