Haseena Parkar movie review: The Shraddha Kapoor film is a tiring watch

Haseena Parkar movie review: The film spends considerable time on Haseena’s backstory.

Haseena Parkar movie cast: Shraddha Kapoor, Siddhant Kapoor, Ankur Bhatia, Rajesh Tailang, Priyanka Setia
Haseena Parkar movie director: Apoorva Lakhia
Haseena Parkar movie rating: 1.5 stars

The persona of the female don pops up every once in a while as a diversion, but full-fledged Bollywood films revolving around such characters are rare.

In 1999, there was Shabana Azmi’s ‘Godmother’. And now comes ‘Haseena Parkar’, which has Shraddha Kapoor play the part of Dawood Ibrahim’s sister, a woman who started off as a wife and mother, and who grew into becoming a fearsome entity, flouting the law with impunity, deriving her power from her Bhai-in-Dubai.

The film spends considerable time on Haseena’s backstory. Her father was a police constable who is shown as someone who could not stop his sons go down the path of wrong-doing; Haseena herself is shown as someone who is pleased enough to own a smuggled watch, but who would have been quite content to spend her life the way it was shaping up post-marriage and motherhood. And who ended up where she did only because of circumstances.

This could have been a deeply interesting sketch of a woman who is clearly capable of being much more than she started out with. But ‘Haseena Parkar’ offers no such insight. Shraddha Kapoor manages the young wife-and-mother part well enough, but her transition to the other side is never fully realized: she appears to be speaking her lines to order, and the cheek-pads to add flesh to her jowls, and the deliberately heavier voice, is all put on. Also, she never really looks old enough for the older woman’s part. That’s double the artifice.

The supporting cast is also by the numbers, and tediously so. Siddhant Kapoor, Shraddha’s brother in real life, plays Dawood, and does nothing we haven’t seen before in previous iterations of the dreaded don. Bhatia as Haseena’s strapping, handsome husband does his job, and gets out of the way.

The rest is a long and winding and weary telling of a story which could have been something, but comes off merely as a tired re-tread of tired re-treads.