Around 17 minutes into Dhai Chaal, a two-hour and 48-minute long, unnecessarily protracted film masquerading as a spy-games actioner, a character delivers the most important dialogue in the film. He tells someone on the phone, “Jaldi bakwaas karo kya masla hai! [Get to the point quickly, will you!]. This line, by proxy, could also apply to the filmmakers.

By now, much has happened in the film, but it is of little narrative consequence.

Dhai Chaal — the title is a reference to how a knight moves in the game of chess — stars Shamoon Abbasi as Kulbhushan Jadhav and Humayoun Ashraf as a washed-up cameo-ish send-up of Shaan Shahid’s infallible agent Mujtaba from Waar.

If one believes the trailer that is supposed to emulate Shaan’s film, then the story is based on the cloak-and-dagger war of spies and insurgents planted by India to split Pakistan from inside. The film is a winner… if the Razzie Awards (given annually to the worst films in Hollywood) were a thing in Pakistan.

By far, the most unbearably painful, cinematically criminal release of the year — and that includes runner-up titles from other genres such as 13 — Dhaai Chaal tops the countries’ list of badly made movies that have all but decimated the lineage left by Waar, a film I didn’t particularly like when it came out, but which now looks like a masterpiece in comparison to Dhai Chaal.

Dhai Chaal is, by far, the most unbearably painful, cinematically criminal release of the year

O21, Yalghaar, Saya-i-Khuda-i-Zuljalal, Project Ghazi, Sherdil (save Zarrar and Parwaz-i-Junoon to an extent) — all of these patriotic actioners were severely lacking in every department of storytelling known to the craft of filmmaking. Believe it or not, Dhaai Chaal builds on their failures.

The premise, about a haphazardly cut plot about five college-going youth from Balochistan, RAW agents, their Pakistani cohorts, a Pakistani journalist and a heroic covert agency, prioritises production logistics and actors’ dates, and not the intelligence to tell a cohesive, engaging story.

One wonders what the actual screenplay would have been like if, that is, there were such a thing; the credited screenwriter is Farheen Chaudhry. Scenes are long and burdened by expositions, and sequences are cobbled together to form a semblance of a linear story. The focus is all over the place.

Emphasis is lobbed on to characters who one doesn’t give two hoots about, because no one rises above their flat, uninteresting personas. The cast of characters deliver dialogues in wholesale quantities, but without punch or conviction. I’ve probably seen courtroom dramas with fewer spoken lines.

The conversations hardly leave living rooms, dinner tables, and carpeted sitting areas, where actors talk with a level of professionalism that barely rises above amateur playacting.

Three actors slightly defy this convention: Shamoon Abbasi, Saleem Mairaj and Humayoun Ashraf. Abbasi, whose filmography is made up of playing bad guys in films of late — save Ishrat Made in China — is Patel, an entrepreneur who romances the naive journalist played by Ayesha Omer, who is “covering Balochistan [and] promoting tourism.”

Patel oozes sleaze, and Abbasi delivers it with utter professionalism. Later in the film, Patel turns out to be — insert fake gasp of shock here — the Indian spy Jadhav.

Ashraf, the leading man from the poster, whom his team first refers to as “The Professor”, will eventually get to Jadhav, after a long, meandering waste of runtime. Ashraf is the film’s least explored character. We first see him 20 minutes into the film, then promptly forget about him for a good chunk until he reminds us he is also in the film.

Most of the actor’s work is relegated to substandard action set pieces — save for one lone sequence of a bomb threat at a cricket match. The rousing anthem, Niklo Pakistan Ki Khaatir (sung by Sahir Ali Bagga) is wasted in the film.

The villains’ roster includes the late Rasheed Naz, Adnan Shah Tipu, Saleem Mairaj, Irfan Motiwala and Mehboob Sultan. By villain standards, they are all hammy duds.

Mairaj’s character, who is introduced one hour into the film, feels like an afterthought. Wearing a weird dishevelled wig and flaunting a moderately insane tilt (no one in the film is totally bonkers, by the way), Mairaj is the only reason one remembers this baddie; the man is such a fine actor … who, alas, also succumbs to the amateurish ambience of this endeavour with time.

The young cast of Taqi Ahmed, Faraz Marri, Waqas Khan, Pakiza Khan and Anya Hasan is mostly forgettable, and since they have more to do with the political, territorial insurgencies in Pakistan — and take up most of the film’s runtime — I won’t spill their stories here… except to say they need acting classes.

Ahmed, one of the key youngsters whose story does indeed have some meagre effect on the narrative, makes for a bad Hamza Ali Abbasi replacement from Waar — he plays the bright-eyed youth who loses the love of his life when he joins Pakistan’s Special Ops unit.

It is hard to believe Dhai Chaal could be so consistent in its inconsistency, be it the groan-inducing performances, the penny-pinched production value (from what one can see on the screen), the badly lit scenes, the mix-and-match camera settings (one doubts if one brand of camera is used throughout the film), the horrible sound, the patchwork called the editing or the hack job that is the colour grade (the colour tone often shifts badly from sequence to sequence without rhyme or reason).

The obvious culprit for the botched, well, everything, would be the director, Taimoor Shirazi.

One can write long passages about the lack of direction here, but then that would be akin to repeating Dhai Chaal’s major mistake: unnecessary exposition. Instead, one should just label it disappointing — a word that feels insufficient and underwhelming when put in the context of what one has seen. But it may be the nicest word one can associate with Dhai Chaal.

Released by Hum Films, Dhai Chaal is running in cinemas across Pakistan … just don’t ask me for how long though

Published in Dawn, ICON, December 10th, 2023