00:00Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan may be the king of romance, but his charm and charisma cannot save this love story.
00:11Directed by Anand L Rai and written by Himanshu Sharma, who has given us hits like Tanu Wed's Manu return series,
00:18Zeerosh falls short of expectations.
00:20We are first introduced to Bawa Singh, a dwarf played by Shah Rukh Khan.
00:25The thing with Shah Rukh Khan movies is that his persona overpowers every role that he takes.
00:31The same happens with his character in Zeero.
00:35You can't help but escape the fact that you're watching a big superstar in action.
00:40Somehow, even Bawa Singh, he may be short-statured, he may be conceited,
00:44but you can't help but notice that you're just witnessing Shah Rukh Khan and his 50 shades as an actor at play.
00:53It's a bizarre love story of Bawa Singh who's short-statured and meets Afia,
00:58who we are told is a prodigy mathematician.
01:01She's on a mission to send a man to Mars.
01:04There's not a lot of history on how she got there or the kind of intelligent mindset that she comes from
01:11because she falls in love with Bawa Singh.
01:13Their courtship is not believable.
01:15In fact, it's so swift and unbelievable that you have to suspend belief.
01:20This is one movie where you have to keep suspending logic at every turn.
01:24There's also a segment in the first half where Bawa Singh gets mitten by a troubled Bollywood starlet
01:29played ably by Katrina Kaif.
01:32Katrina Kaif is in her element as Bhabita Kumari, who's just an emotional train wreck.
01:38She's always with the bottle and she is a nervous wreck.
01:42Bawa Singh comes into her life almost like a vanity case,
01:45where she just finds some amusement having him hang around.
01:49This whole segment of them being together, a starlet who's way out of her league,
01:55just does not make sense either.
01:57While the first half is engaging, it's the second half that demands that you actually leave all your brains behind.
02:04Because there's also a segment where Shah Rukh Khan comes across as George Clooney in Gravity.
02:09There is this whole part where he is the chosen man to go to Mars.
02:14How he becomes an astronaut all of a sudden is by chance.
02:17He just replaces a chimpanzee, we are told.
02:20But all of this just does not add up.
02:22While these characters are interesting individually,
02:25like Bawa Singh as cheeky and conceited with a wicked sense of humour is interesting to watch,
02:31and Afia is also feisty, together they don't make sense at all.
02:36None of these characters come together as a whole.
02:38And it is one of those love stories where you walk out of the cinema scratching your heads in disbelief,
02:44wondering why did these two dimwits come together in the first place?
02:49And if they are so dimwitted, they belong with each other.
02:52I think that's one of the reactions that I'm sure director Anand Elrai did not want the audiences to have.
02:57We are not invested in this love story for one bit.
03:00Speaking of chemistry, the only pair in this film that seems to have some fireworks between them
03:04is Mohammad Zeeshan Ayub Khan and Bawa Singh, of course played by A. Khan.
03:09Those two knock off jokes of each other and those are the witty lines that make you smile in the movie.
03:15The scene set in the space station where it is Afia's workplace is simply out of this world.
03:22Even if you are an ardent fan of Shah Rukh Khan just like how I am,
03:25you might walk out of the cinemas disappointed.
03:28I'm going with 1.5 out of 5.
03:31For the full review, go to gulfnews.com slash tabloid.
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