Ghajini 15 years on: Aamir Khan’s film, which became Hindi cinema’s first Rs 100-crore earner, is a hard pass

Ghajini feels archaic. Had it been an 80s film, when masala-actioners, with morally uncorrupted superbeing heroes taking on demonic villains singlehandedly, defined Hindi cinema, I would have still given it a pass. But it came in the decade when the audience of Hindi cinema was warming up to sensible, close-to-home entertainers like Dil Chahta Hai, Jab We Met, A Wednesday, Omkara, Black and Rang De Basanti.

2008’s Ghajini hit the headlines for the transformation Aamir Khan went through for the role.

Borrowed from Christopher Nolan’s Memento and a remake of AR Murugadoss’ Tamil film of the same name, Ghajini is a predictable, unbearable, briefly punctuated by few amusing moments, revenge saga with a background score that can give you a headache similar to one that happens when a kid starts banging pots and pans together. The plot gives you many chances to say “What?”. Consider this: in the opening scene, a medical professor tells his adult medical students, “Brain controls all functions of a human body.” Yeah, maybe they missed this information about the human body in class 5.

Then, we are introduced to Aamir’s Sanjay Singhania, a man with a shaved head, and beefed-up body, who punches and inserts taps in the belly of men double his size. But while beating them, he forgets why he’s doing it as he was once hit by an iron rod, resulting in a 15-minute attention span due to anterograde amnesia (the medical term for short-term memory loss). The flashback tells us that before becoming this killing machine, Sanjay owned a mobile phone company and always had an entourage following him. But as Hindi films have taught us, ‘Dukh mein toh apne bhi saath chorr dete hain’, Sanjay Singhania is left all alone after a deadly attack on him. His business empire, his entourage, his managers, everything vanishes. But why and how? You will never know.

The flashback, which appears between the shrieking action sequences, narrates the stereotypical meet-cute love story of uber-rich Sanjay with a struggling, aspiring model Kalpana, played by Asin. It is painful to sit through her chirpy character, the style which once suited Kajol, Juhi Chawla and Preity Zinta, not her. Their romantic sequence, where Aamir most animatedly sings ‘Beheka Main Beheka’ and ‘Guzaarish’ (don’t hate me, this AR Rahman composition is a gem), makes the die-hard fan of the romantic genre in me cringe and wait for the film to return to the present. However, tragedy strikes and Kalpana, who tries to rescue young girls from trafficking, is brutally killed by our villain Ghajini (Pardeep Rawat) in front of Sanjay, who survives the blow of an iron rod.

Seething in ‘badle ki aag’ even after losing his memory, Sanjay gets his body tattooed with all the crucial information like, “Kalpana was killed”, “Find him kill him” and several phone numbers and addresses. His apartment is well-equipped to help the forgetful Sanjay with his belongings and the sole purpose of his existence: kill Ghajini. A rugged Aamir excels at bringing out the rage of Sanjay. The film could have been a perfect departure from his filmography but is let down by a half-baked plot.

Just when you hope for the story to take an interesting turn, it lets you down. Imagine raising the bar to Ghajini discovering about Sanjay’s quest to kill him and turning up at his apartment to destroy all his research and clues; mercilessly removing all tattooes from his body, but then not giving expression to Sanjay’s helplessness. Wish Murugadoss could have paid more attention to details and developing his characters rather than wasting time on Jiah Khan’s unnecessary dance number (also, if someone could explain the reason that her character existed in the first place) and a yawnfest of Aamir and Asin’s love story.

My recommendation would be not to watch Ghajini and I would also like to forget it in the next fifteen minutes. Christopher Nolan was upset when he found out that AR Murugadoss had remade his movie Memento as Ghajini without giving him due credit. But, if I could tell Mr Nolan, ‘Don’t worry, Ghajini is nowhere close to Memento.’