It’s impossible to scavenge a single moment of originality in ‘Baazaar’. Director Gauravv K. Chawla tries to put on the big boots of Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone to present an Indian twist to those iconic Hollywood Wall Street mov­ies about big-league stock market players. But Baazaar is a film made without gambling much on new ideas. Instead it sails on safe waters to head on a narrative journey that has been done to death. Small-town stock trader Rizwan (Rohan Mehra) thinks it’s time to leave behind his middle-class roots and his principled father, who val­ues honesty and simple living, for a high-stake life of stock trading in Mumbai. After reaching Mumbai, the gooey-eyed and determined Rizwan works hard to first get accepted at a top-tier stock brok­ing company and climb the ladder to ultimately work side-by-side his idol Sakun Kothari (Saif Ali Khan), a self-made business tycoon known for his questionable investment methods. Once our young rookie gets close to the seasoned player, it becomes pretty clear that swim­ming with sharks like Sakun comes with both perks and threats.

The screenplay doesn’t get too hard on the protagonist. Writers Aseem Arora and Parveez Sheikh pepper many mini-crises and close escapes at regular intervals. None of these land any empathetic effect or make us care for Rizwan.

We see him easily cruising out of these sticky situations because the writers give him too many lucky breaks and chances. Rohan Mehra, the spruced-up debutant, as Rizwan has an overbearing pres­ence, amplified by his average act­ing talent and his weakly written character who is arrogant, over­confident and stupid, but never very likable.

Saif Ali Khan’s Sakun Kothari is also pretty generic and one-di­mensional. From his first scene he’s established as a menacing and mean-spirited sociopath. But his mind games get tad too repetitive and lose steam as the story moves on. And the women of Baazaar, Radhika Apte and Chitrangda Singh, are wasted. They function as mere plot devices and are never given any character depth.

With an unoriginal story and less-than-inspiring performances, Baazaar lacks the ambitiousness to sell something interesting about the Indian stock market.

Just like Rizwan hero-wor­ships Sakun, director Gauravv K. Chawla bows to films like 2013’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and 1987’s ‘Wall Street’ as his holy grail. And in an attempt to recreate the arcs and themes of those films, Chawla is too boxed in by the glitz and glare of the Hollywood por­trayal of the stock market world that he deprives us of a uniquely Indian context.

Baazaar is the kind of movie that could’ve worked had it released five years ago. Today, due to our exposure to lot of Ameri­can TV series and films, it feels formulaic and isn’t clever enough to make us rave about it. To say the least, the film will be easily forgotten and wouldn’t increase the marketing values of the makers and actors involved O

 It’s impossible to scavenge a single moment of originality in ‘Baazaar’. Director Gauravv K. Chawla tries to put on the big boots of Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone to present an Indian twist to those iconic Hollywood Wall Street mov­ies about big-league stock market players. But Baazaar is a film made without gambling much on new ideas. Instead it sails on safe waters to head on a narrative journey that has been done to death. Small-town stock trader Rizwan (Rohan Mehra) thinks it’s time to leave behind his middle-class roots and his principled father, who val­ues honesty and simple living, for a high-stake life of stock trading in Mumbai. After reaching Mumbai, the gooey-eyed and determined Rizwan works hard to first get accepted at a top-tier stock brok­ing company and climb the ladder to ultimately work side-by-side his idol Sakun Kothari (Saif Ali Khan), a self-made business tycoon known for his questionable investment methods. Once our young rookie gets close to the seasoned player, it becomes pretty clear that swim­ming with sharks like Sakun comes with both perks and threats.

The screenplay doesn’t get too hard on the protagonist. Writers Aseem Arora and Parveez Sheikh pepper many mini-crises and close escapes at regular intervals. None of these land any empathetic effect or make us care for Rizwan.

We see him easily cruising out of these sticky situations because the writers give him too many lucky breaks and chances. Rohan Mehra, the spruced-up debutant, as Rizwan has an overbearing pres­ence, amplified by his average act­ing talent and his weakly written character who is arrogant, over­confident and stupid, but never very likable.

Saif Ali Khan’s Sakun Kothari is also pretty generic and one-di­mensional. From his first scene he’s established as a menacing and mean-spirited sociopath. But his mind games get tad too repetitive and lose steam as the story moves on. And the women of Baazaar, Radhika Apte and Chitrangda Singh, are wasted. They function as mere plot devices and are never given any character depth.

With an unoriginal story and less-than-inspiring performances, Baazaar lacks the ambitiousness to sell something interesting about the Indian stock market.

Just like Rizwan hero-wor­ships Sakun, director Gauravv K. Chawla bows to films like 2013’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and 1987’s ‘Wall Street’ as his holy grail. And in an attempt to recreate the arcs and themes of those films, Chawla is too boxed in by the glitz and glare of the Hollywood por­trayal of the stock market world that he deprives us of a uniquely Indian context.

Baazaar is the kind of movie that could’ve worked had it released five years ago. Today, due to our exposure to lot of Ameri­can TV series and films, it feels formulaic and isn’t clever enough to make us rave about it. To say the least, the film will be easily forgotten and wouldn’t increase the marketing values of the makers and actors involved.