Critics’ Verdict: ‘Shorgul’ Is Just a Lot of Noise

Read how critics are reacting to the latest release ‘Shorgul’

Film: Shorgul
Directors: P Singh and Jitendra Tiwari
Cast: Jimmy Shergill, Ashutosh Rana, Hiten Tejwani, Sanjay Suri

Excerpts from reviews of the film:

There’s potential to begin with. A luckless Hindu-Muslim romance. Weapons changing hands. Leaders readying to grab power at any cost. A ‘ghar-waapsi’ situation. We even hear people mention such incendiary words as ‘gau mata’, so loaded that just their utterance can cause a fatal conflagration.But despite all this, and the fact that the film touches upon how tenuous life can be, Shorgul is reduced to a clichéd melodrama with its bloody clashes between the sword-wielding `Musalmaans’ and `trishul-dhaari’ Hindus.

Shubhra Gupta (IndianExpress.com)

The film – co-directed by Tiwari with P. Singh – is noisy, lacks finesse and depth, and the political machinations are diluted to irritating effect by too many loud songs and problematic production quality. The Muzaffarnagar riots are a blot on contemporary history and the wounds from that blaze are yet to heal. It is almost criminal to use references to this human tragedy to draw audiences into a deafening, unimaginative, ordinary film.

Anna MM Vetticad (Firstpost.com)

The capitalised sincerity of Shorgul only conceals its many problems. Directors P Singh and Jitendra Tiwari have attempted to expose the causes of the 2013 riots in the Uttar Pradesh area of Muzzafarnagar (renamed Malihabad in the movie). But the filmmakers’ love for contrivance, simplification and populist rhetoric combine to make Shorgul yet another misfired investigation of the true nature of communal conflagrations in India.

Nandini Ramnath (Scroll.in)