One may expect the characters in Dorr (Run) to run around as if the devil is chasing them with a pitchfork. The characters flee, yes, but it’s more of a quick sprint through backalleys and cargo containers, and not a full-fledged run.

Yasir (Asad Mehmood) is an honest, strapping young man who works as a locksmith because he can’t find a decent job. Late one night, he gets hoodwinked by a pack of local ruffians (led by Waseem Ali) to open the locks to the doors of a house, where an old man (Yasir Mehmood) has saved a tidy sum for his daughter’s wedding (Arooj Chaudhry, playing Mehru).

Yasir, being the good guy that he is, flees with Mehru, leaving Lahore for Peshawar; by karmic circumstances, the villains also flee the city with them.

The plot keeps your interest intact — and then a twist happens out of the blue (a good one at that), and we’re shoehorned into a seemingly unconnected parallel track about a man-of-action and his desperate search for his wife (Hafsa Rajpoot).

Director Kamran Cheema and screenwriter Kamran Rafiq’s Dorr is their take on late ’90s and early 2000s Lollywood clichés

This second leg of the race is just plain bad.

Haider (Shahbaz Chaudhry) is Dorr’s second lead — a cop-turned-hunter in search of a bigger gang of dacoits led by the killer of cops and women, Kaali (Saleem Mairaj).

The plots intermingle, though barely.

Screenwriter Kamran Rafiq’s take on the idea is a collection of Lollywood cliches — and by Lollywood, I expressly single out movies made by Lahore’s filmmakers during the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

This flavour of cinema suits director Kamran Cheema just fine; in fact, he is single-handedly keeping that particular flair of cinema alive in the age of urban, multiplex-minded productions.

From what I’ve seen so far, Cheema — whose last film, Geo Sar Utha Ke (GSUK), banked on a similar flavour — is a kinetic, visually driven director who knows how to rodeo haphazard plot points into a gratifying assembly of scenes that pass off as a good-enough pastime, despite their hard-to-look-at palette.

I’ve hardly seen footage from the cinema camera RED look this bad. The editing is quite poor as well.

Despite taking guilty pleasure in GSUK, one sees that Cheema’s effort on creating characters and milking performances did require work.

In Dorr’s case, simply double the weight of my prior conclusions.

Dorr is hampered by its superficially written lead pair. They flee, they’re good, and they get a few songs — which, by the way, sound fairly good to the ear (the music is by Waqas Ali). The villains…well, they’re just bad, but not immoral.

“We’re not corrupt, we’re dacoits,” Kaali tells his brother-in-law and cohort (Kamran Mujahid) in one scene where he splits their last loot evenly. Clearly, he is a man of principle — as insane as he may look (he’s not that scary, by the way).

Saleem Mairaj, always a fine addition in the bleakest and the most unappetising of movies, delivers a fine, if predictably stereotypical villain, with mangled long hair and dirty clothes (why is it that villains always seem as if they need to take a bath?).

Mairaj and his glee-driven gang, co-led by an equally insane wife (Sidra Noor, quite good) can only do so much for the film, when the lead actors — who the audience should connect with — deliver stilted performances.

Dorr would have been a better experience if the director would have just stuck to one track, and kept the story running (pun intended) in that direction. It wouldn’t have been that different of a movie, yet perhaps, a fairly better one.

Distributed by Metro Live Movies, produced by Aslam Hassan (who also plays a key character in the story), Dorr is rated U and is suitable for audiences of all ages

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 7th, 2023