Omertà review: A well-constructed study of EVIL!

Movie: Omerta

Director: Hansal Mehta

Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Rajesh Tailang, Rupinder Nagra, Nisha George, Timothy Ryan Hickwell

Producer(s): Nahid Khan/Swiss Entertainment/Karma Media

Rating: 3.5/5 Stars

Do not mistake Hansal Mehta’s latest Rajkummar Rao-starrer, Omerta to be a popcorn entertainer in any way. It’s a reality check. Omerta is a film that shows the inner workings in the mind of an evil being, what provokes them, what triggers them to go the extreme way for the sake of the men of your faith, and most of all, how much do they equally want to fight corruption in their own fairly wicked way! Also, how many such real-life militants are around, or even worse, how many are budding as you read this? Adding to this, Omerta is all of the above and hasn’t glorified evil one bit.

The story is beautifully told throughout and wastes no time in irrelevant subplots, but instead chronicles the journey of a man who is ready to let go the comfort of a middle class life and an LSE degree and is ready to look into the eyes of death in order to avenge the deaths of several Muslims in several other countries. What it’s leading man, Rajkummar Rao, brings on to the table is simply beyond comprehension. Here, he embodies a real life militant who had a history of maintaining the image of a devious guy-next-door, a certain British-born Pakistani militant that goes by the name of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a super-focused extremist who is currently alive and serving his lifetime imprisonment sentence. Hansal Mehta embeds into the story a few clever charming lines for the man, and when they are matched by Rao’s stellar act, it gives you a boy next door you’d rather stay away from. A majority of the dialogues here are in English, for which Rao picks up a stellar British accent, given that the character required it. On the other hand, we remember that during an interview with Rajeev Masand, Rao exclaimed that how during the shoot of the film, the character would stay with Rao and he would end up scaring his near and dear ones. All we are going to say is, we felt the same too. We couldn’t simply believe that the last film we saw him in, he was a government clerk that was righteous to a fault in Newton, which is India’s foreign-film Oscar entry this year.

Special mention goes to the man who played the now-deceased Wall Street Journal journalist Danny Pearl, Timothy Ryan Hickwell and then Abhimanyu Garg, Inderpreet Sawhney and Roopak Kathpalia. You guys know what you bring to the table. Also, a yet another special mention goes to the editor Aditya Warrier for keeping it all crisp and tidy.

But, we bet that it wouldn’t have hurt if the makers would have added a few Bollywood-like funny scenes here and there, which need not have involved Rao. Because, the film feels like a Hollywood production to a certain extent, because of a majority of the dialogues are in English. Here, we are simply talking from a commercial perspective, so that it would appeal to the audience a little bit more, although many things are already going on for the film anyways. So, in order for this to work, we simply hope that the intention of this film is clear to the audience.

From our end, at least, it’s a must watch! And now we got more than enough reasons to forgive Me. Mehta here for Simran!