Shakuntala Devi Movie Review: A Typical Vidya Balan Film, her performance couldn’t save the movie
Shakuntala Devi Movie Review
Director: Anu Menon
Star Cast: Vidya Balan, Sanya Malhotra, Jisshu Sengupta, Amit Sadh, Sheeba Chaddha, Prakash Belawadi
Genre – Biopic
OTT – Amazon Prime
Producer – Vikram Malhotra
Production House – Abundantia Entertainment and Sony Pictures Networks India
Writer – Ishita Moitra
Cinematography – Keiko Nakahara
Ratings – 2.5
Plot
The film Shakuntala Devi is a biographical comedy-drama film, which is based on the life of a great mathematician who is called as Human Computer. The lady is known to have a supernatural power to carry out the mental Math even faster than a computer. She has been good with numbers since her childhood and wants to travel all around the world. When the world recognizes her skill set, she is seen moving to different places to showcase her exceptional talent. The film also talks about her personal relationship with her daughter and touches all the key milestones in her life.
Review
The story of the lady has much more interesting things to showcase, but the way the makers have pursued this venture is nothing than a typical B Town biopic. Otherwise, the story has many interesting elements like her father being a homofierce desire in the early seventies, her daughter’s fight for her 50 crores property and so on. The makers had the chance to get emotionally connected to the non-math sections of her life, but it seemed getting buried down to the ultimate motive of the movie. In a sense, we see makers missing out some key exciting chapters from Shakuntala’s life. All we could see the film being joyous and colourful despite all these emotional drama. The content seems very abrupt and scattered.
Talking about the performances, Vidya Balan seemed to play the tailor made role for the lady by nailing it once again. She has tried to balance the emotions and quirky scenes with a great amount of balance. On the other side, one can see Sanya Malhotra to be an ultimate charmer, which is seen sticking to her trademarked spark with Vidya. However, her character needed a good amount of detailing as well, yet she managed to have done well. The others like Jisshu Sengupta and Amit Sadh seemed okay seen somewhere underutilized in the film. Similar was the story of Sheeba Chaddha & Prakash Belawadi as they had little space to showcase their brilliant acting.
Talking about direction and music, Anu seemed to take liberty but more often it did not witness working in her favour. The music seemed okay and did not add much value to the film. The background score by Karan Kulkarni seemed good while at times it went overboard in the film. The other elements like screenplay, editing, photography and other elements were okay as they failed to add any impact on the overall entertainment value of the film.
The Last Word
The film stands on only one thing, the incredible performance of Vidya while playing the human-computer. One can find the film with too many glitches, yet can be called a one-time watch film.
Shakuntala Devi Trailer :
