Padmaavat – Movie Review

In the midst of few ludicrous allegations from religious groups, state governments, and nonsensical people Padmaavat finally got released to the public nearly two months after its initial release date. But, after making the news headlines for at least three months, did it live up to everyone’s hype? I must say, NO!

As Y’all already knew it by now, the storyline of Padmaavat revolves around a barbarous ruler and the ‘Sultan of Delhi’ Alauddin Khilji (Ranveer Singh) and his mad quest to capture the ‘Queen of Chittor’ Rani Padmavati (Deepika Padukone), whom he believes will fill in the missing bit in his journey to be the most powerful leader in the entire world.

Clocking at a drawn-out two-hour forty-five-minute runtime, I should say that this film tested my patience for the most part. Indeed they’re few positives that I’ll get to in a moment, but, with a fairly familiar storyline and a lackluster screenplay crafted with scenes that we’ve already seen many times before, this film predominantly didn’t peak my interest dramatically or emotionally.

And I consider that as a big letdown. Coming from the house of Bhansali, we expect much more than elegant costumes, grandeur production design, and fantastic BGM from an epic historical film. We expect a tightly packed storyline, beguiling screenplay (which would’ve been better as the film, for the most part, is fictionalized) and characters that we could get behind; therefore when something dramatic happens there will be an emotional impact in the audience member. Moreover, they’re many scenes in the film including the climax which had the potential to look and feel poignant, but, Bhansali totally misses the opportunity and in turn, makes it a 163-minute snore-fest.

As I stated earlier, they’re few positives to look into in this film, primarily the music and the background score by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Sanchit Balhara was astounding. The songs were choreographed and picturized masterfully and the production design was exquisite, which I must give Bhansali props for, he truly captured the 13th-century look magnificently that involves vast research and hard work.

Another major positive for the film is undoubtedly the performance by Ranveer Singh, his charisma and the way that he presented this barbarous cold-blooded evil character was something truly exceptional. Weirdly, when you start to root for the bad guy, that’s when you know the actor had excelled with his performance. Shahid Kapoor was more or less decent, as his character was by far the weakest when compared to the other two. Coming to Deepika Padukone, I don’t know who proposed the idea to digitally soften up her face in the post-production to make her resemble the moon, but, that distracted me during the entire film. Anyhow, being the focal point of the plot, I expected Deepika’s character to be profound and with nearly (excluding the climax) zero character moments her performance didn’t stand-out for me. And I’m not going to complain about how bad the CGI looked at times because it is something involved with the budget of the movie.

Overall, barring Ranveer Singh’s extraordinary performance, Padmaavat suffers from its unexciting storyline, poorly written screenplay and an exhausting runtime which conclusively made it a tedious watch. After literally being bombarded by the news channels left and right with the controversies and allegations, this is not something that I expected from Sanjay Leela Bhansali, a boring film!