Even if the screenplay doesn't quite stand up by itself, the rolling hills of Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir, the fields of Punjab and the flat barrenness of Rajasthan are enough to mesmerise the audience.Ī R Rahman's music is less powerful than his earlier scores but the songs in Highway nevertheless touch a chord. The vistas are another feature of the movie. From his mastery of the local language to his rural angst against the ways and means of the rich to his conflicting feelings for Veera, Hooda pulls off Mahabir Bhatti with aplomb. Alia Bhatt tries hard to convince us of her ever-changing feelings for her surroundings and her wide-eyed wonder helps her to a great extent but she is still a rookie.
The redeeming features though make this movie a one-time watch. If this is meant to show the relationship between captor and captive and its progression from contempt to Bollywoodised Stockholm Syndrome, Ali fails to pulling it off.
Ali throws in too many unpredictability for the audience and moves the pace of the movie in a non-rhythmic manner.
With Highway, Ali gets into digital filmmaking for the first time but the story and screenplay somehow never come together. Highway continues this trend with an angsty protagonist played by Randeep Hooda (Mahabir Bhatti) and a rich brat Alia Bhatt (Veera Tripathi) who is about to get married falling in his clutches after a late night drive goes wrong.Īli once told me that he loves the freedom of writing his own story, dialogues and screenplay before he wields the directorial mike. An established director should seek to stay in his comfort zone if he sees that straying from his zone wreaks havoc. It seemed that with Rockstar Ali wanted to get into the zone of coming-of-age stories. Like a messiah of the confused millennial generation, Ali descended into Bollywood to show them their love stories giving incredible gems at the start of his career such as Socha Na Tha, Love Aaj Kal and Jab We Met. There is something incredibly tantalising about watching an Imtiaz Ali movie.