As much as it pains me to say this, Abhi, the long-gestating production starring Kubra Khan and Gohar Mumtaz that finally released this Eid-ul-Azha, should have stayed that way: partially complete and on the edit table.

For producers, it would have been a great way to apply for a tax write-off and, for the audiences, the facade of a better film would have been maintained.

For almost the entire run-time of two hours and 20 minutes (give or take a few minutes), my eyes, ears and brain searched for the relevance of the title. Despite willy-nilly promulgations of rising up for justice (abhi means now, or right now), Abhi, the title, doesn’t mean much… unless you count the fact that the lead character has a social media channel by the name of… yes, you guessed it, Abhi.

This is a channel we don’t get to see anywhere in the film, by the way! That bit is thrown in as a passing dialogue and then relegated to oblivion…like every other bit of logic in the film.

Written by a bunch of people — the screenplay is by Shoaib Rabbani, the concept and the story by Mumtaz, dialogues by Rabbani and Ali Moeen, and script mentoring by THE Shoaib Mansoor — the plot appears to have been thrown out of the window of a speeding train so that the story could be contorted to highlight the lead actor.

Abhi was made over two long years and it shows. The problem with the film is… well… just about everything

In case one is wondering, that actor is Mumtaz, who plays Hamza Ahmed, a youngster from Muzaffarabad yearning to be a pop-singer.

Hamza’s wish becomes a young damsel-in-distress’ command. This unknown damsel sprints up to a car repair shop where Hamza assists his elder brother Haroon (Saleem Sheikh, good enough), and demands safe asylum from three hoods who turn out to be her bodyguards.

The chief of her chasers is Marhoom Ahmad Bilal, putting up an effeminate persona for the sake of comedy that doesn’t work. Bilal, by the way, disappears from the film after this scene.

The girl announces herself as Zara (Kubra Khan), a minister’s daughter from Lahore visiting Muzaffarabad, who takes an immediate liking to Hamza. By immediate, I mean, after a series of stilted scenes that fail to stir any notion of love and romance (the film is supposed to be a romance-drama).

Hamza musters up the courage to get his mum (Hina Bayat) and brother’s blessing, and travels to Lahore on Zara’s belief that his singing prowess can make him big. That doesn’t happen.

Hamza is booted out by the manager (Irfan Motiwala) of a five-star hotel after his first gig, when he professes to not know the words of Munni Badnaam Hui. The song had been requested by Zara’s drunk, cigar-chomping minister dad and his other minister friends (Usman Peerzada, in a half-hearted performance, and Mahmood Aslam, wearing a bad moustache, respectively).

Despite being let go, Zara tells Hamza that he will get another gig the next day at the very same hotel. The gig, she tells him, will be to sing at a birthday party — and no, you don’t get points for deducing that it is Zara’s own birthday. Oh, the surprise! — but not the one, one is probably thinking of.

The party sequence starts with a brief exterior shot that leads to the song ‘Pyar da nasha’, which leads to two follow-up locations in a continuing sequence. In these scenes, we see Mumtaz’s face, gait and hairstyle change so dramatically that one literally believes that there is a time-jump in the story.

But there are no time-jumps. The sequence had simply been shot in a span of years, not months, and that glaring fact alerts and attunes one’s senses to look for other jumps in the physicality of actors.

One is not disappointed — though that disappointment pales in front of the film’s actual big reveal.

As the song sequence ends, and romance tries to finally bloom (it doesn’t), Hamza — a lone nobody from nowhere, and not the minister’s good-looking daughter — is kidnapped by terrorists. Gasp!

This big twist (evident from the trailer) introduces haphazard, slapdash ideas about Indian terrorists, uproarious media crusades about saving a nobody (ie Hamza), and Hamza’s dad’s backstory (the dad is played by Shahzad Nawaz, donning a low and heavy voice).

In this latter half of Abhi, many actors are shoehorned into roles that mean nothing, nor give them room to do anything! Utterly wasted are the talents of Adnan Shah Tipu in a role of a mere few scenes and even fewer lines, and Hareem Farooq, an exceptional actress playing an unexceptional character who is visually impaired.

Farooq comes out of the blue in the story and is whacked off just as suddenly without intelligence. She is not the only actor who is on the receiving end of weak characterisation (though not bad acting, per se). That credit also goes to Kashif Javed, who plays a minor character named Salim that gets a generous amount of screen time to practically do nothing meaningful for the story. This, of course, is the screenplay’s fault, and not the actor’s.

Salim is the second officer to a slightly pivotal character named Salman (Rana Majid Khan, Mehmood Aslam’s son), and despite being filmed in the span of two years, Javed’s look and gait remains as consistent as his performance. If anything, that commitment is applause-worthy.

The applause for consistency in performance also goes to Abhi’s director Asad Mumtaz (also known as Asad Malik and Asad Malik Mumtaz), who plays the role of a semi-bad terrorist from Pakistan’s beautiful, barren South Waziristan region.

As an actor, Asad Mumtaz has been around since forever, though his recent claim to fame comes from the serial Parizaad. Mumtaz is also an ace cinematographer from television (one of his credits include the serial Alif). As Abhi’s cinematographer, Mumtaz’s expertise with the camera lends a consistent “big-screen film look” to the scenes — though what good are the looks when scenes are noticeably chopped and force-fitted to create a barely working narrative in the edit?

I think I don’t have to extrapolate an answer.

Abhi’s problem is… well… just about everything. The soundtrack is okay-ish. With Gohar Mumtaz coming from a pop music background — he was the founding member of the phenomenal band Jal — delivering just an okay soundtrack is akin to a crime.

The technicalities are somewhat okay. The narrative, characters arcs, plot, sub-plots, conflicts, high-points, resolutions, acting are cack-handed and unconvincing.

At times, one sees neck-to-neck competition between Kubra Khan’s surface-level performance of a bubbly, carefree yet serious girl, and Gohar Mumtaz’s flat acting of a motiveless character on a journey to nowhere.

That is one competition one shouldn’t see, now nor ever.

Released by Hum Films in association with

Hum-YS Films, Abhi is produced by Pennine Kennedy Productions & GM Productions. The film is rated (U) and is suitable for audiences of all ages…who can stomach half-baked films

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 23rd, 2024