Review of Shahjahan

Introduction

Here we have a modern day Cupid, a Doctor Love if you will by the name of Ashok (Vijay), who goes around fixing relationships and arranging marriages for couples that don`t have their parents` approval or blessing.

One day he comes across the girl of his dreams, Mahi (Richa Palot), but refuses to tell anyone about her, his time will come and he`ll confess all to her. While he`s biding his time however, a friend of his, Raja (Krishna), comes to him for some love help. He`s fallen for this woman, followed (stalked?) her around for about five days and has no idea how to tell her that he loves her. Five days eh, he`s got it bad. She knows that he`s hanging around, and she kinda likes him but is unsure of the next step.

Anyway, the love fixer is on hand with some advice on what to do, like catching her eye a few times and then disappearing to see her reaction. You`re bound to be onto a winner when she looks anxious at seeing you`re no longer around. (Works everytime for me). Little does Ashok know that Raja is actually in love with the same woman, Mahi, and he sets them up. together. D`oh!

What happens now? Will Dr Amour ever get himself sorted with a woman or is he doomed just to help others? Without spoiling it, you`re going to have to see this for yourself, see the bloodshed, the stuntwork and the surprising ending.

Video

Yet another cropped 2.20:1 anamorphic transfer from Ayngaran. Overall it`s average with some scenes showing a wholly unacceptable amount of dirt. Colours are reproduced well enough and seem balanced with good levels of contrast. There`s some print damage and one scene looked like it had ghosting too! I`ve come to accept that this is the usual standard to expect so you do tend to ignore it once you`ve seen this level of quality a few times. This doesn`t mean that Ayngaran shouldn`t clean up its act!

Audio

We get the Tamil DD5.1 track and it sounds pretty good. The music stands out and some of the songs are good. Dialogue is clear, even though I can`t understand Tamil, and there are minimal amounts of hiss and crackle, but this seems to be the norm with a lot of Indian movies.

Features

Animated menus with the same disc restart bugs that I`ve found in other Ayngaran titles. There are trailers for Gemini and Mitr. Scene selection, song selection with poor English subtitles. Poor timing and grammer makes following the story a little difficult at times.

Conclusion

This isn`t a bad film at all. Admiteddly it`s influenced by Cyrano de Bergerac but this isn`t a bad thing in itself. I like the idea that one can follow a girl for days on end and then tell her he loves her without getting kicked below the belt in the nethers, mace in the face and brick in the head, not that I`ve tried mind. What I couldn`t reconcile however was the ridiculous and tragic ending. It made me groan very loudly, enough for the whole of Tottenham to hear. It was so promising, entertaining, light hearted and just fun until the last 15 minutes when it just went a bit pear shaped. I can`t believe that stuff like that happens and there are no police in sight! Not even the wail of sirens in the background that you usually hear either.

There was one major continuity error that left me baffled too since the dialogue made absolutely no sense to the timeline. You`d think in a long film like this they would have sorted this out. The casting appears to work well though, the song and dance numbers aren`t bad at all and I could comfortably watch this film through its 2.5 hour runtime (except for the last part that is!).

There are a lot of stunts here, clearly influenced by other films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. With the exception of two very over the top motorcycle stunts that made me wince it wasn`t all bad and maybe next time they`ll remember to remove the wires in post-production.

Worth a rental because it is entertaining, but after that poor ending, I`m pretty sure I won`t want to sit through it again.