Movie review: Jab Tak Hai Jaan

Jab Tak Hai Jaan

Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif, Anushka Sharma
Direction: Yash Chopra
Music: A.R. Rahman

Keeping the emotional factor of Yash Chopra’s demise aside, Jab Tak Hai Jaan lacks the Yash Chopra punch. The story revolves around Major Samar Anand (Shah Ruk Khan) who is an officer in bomb disposal squad in the Indian Army  posted in Kashmir and Ladakh. The opening scene has Shah Ruk Khan defusing his 98^th bomb and he does this without a suit and after which he is shown riding off on his Enfield establishing the fact that he is loner.

But he wasn’t always a loner which is revealed to us when Akira played by Anuska Sharma, an internee with Discovery chances onto Samar Anand’s diary. The narrative then goes back 10 years in London where Samar Anand is an immigrant who earns his daily bread by doing menial jobs. In his spare time he sings and that is when the billionaire heiress Meera (Katrina Kaif) sees him and she approaches him to teach her a Punjabi song to sing at her dad’s 50^th birthday. Samar agrees to do this if in return she teaches him how to speak like a gentleman.

Slowly Samar Anand falls in love with Meera but meets with an accident and Meera who has the habit of bargaining with God, promises God that she would never meet Samar again if God saved him. When Meera explains this to Samar he gets angry and vows that he is going to face death every day to shake Meera’s faith in her Jesus. And that brings us to why he refuses to wear a bomb suit while disposing bombs.

As the film slowly moves into the present, we realize that Akira falls in love with Samar and to know him more she decided to do a documentary on the ‘man who cannot die” so she can be a part of his life for a few days.

The first half of the movie does drag at point when you feel where the story is headed. Except for the song “Challa” the others are a disappointment. A.R. Rahman fails to impress with the musical score which is surprising s as Rahman hardly gets it wrong. The song ‘Ishq Shava’ jars in the script and the movie could have done without the song. The movie falls back on certain Bollywood clichés like road accidents, a head injury, which results in a case of retrograde amnesia and a neurologist who advises some playacting.

The time Akira spends with Samar in the army is far from realistic. The men in uniform as shown as men desperate for female attention and the scene where Samar and Akaria are suspended from the bridge while he diffuses a bomb is unintentionally funny as Akira chats away totally oblivious to the seriousness of the issue.

As far as the acting goes, Shah Rukh Khan has to be given full credit for carrying the film on his shoulder. Katrina Kaif fails to impress though she looks the quintessential innocent Yash Chopra heroine. Anushka Sharma is like a breath of life to the film with her over the top happy go lucky present day Delhi girl. But at times her shrilly voice gets too much to bear. It was nice seeing the softer Kashmir on big screen after long time. The locales of a Yash Chopra movie can never fail and Jab Tak Hai Jaan is yet another testimonial for the same.