Baazaar Movie Review | Do not expect more from this movie

Baazaar , directed by Gauravv K Chawla, is the kind of insipid film that will require someone to take responsibility, and we may call this the fault of the master who made The Wolf Of Wall Street. It’s not that this film copies that alarmingly dynamic one, but rather that this director is so obviously seduced by visions of great films about the stock market, that he rushes — eagerly and without preparation — onto the filmmaking floor to try and join the legends.

Rohan Mehra, son of memorable actor Vinod Mehra, is a young man appallingly free of charisma. The debutant goes through the predictable motions of a shark-to-be, and does so without any discernible talent. Mehra plays a young boy from Allahabad who flies up the rungs of the stockbroking world, in that annoying way characters do when writers are lazy: the problem is not in the wonder-kid knowing everything, but in the way nobody around him seems to know anything.

This avarice is personified in the film by Saif Ali Khan. As a ruthless Gujarati manipulator, Khan is impressively authoritative. It is admittedly hard to believe him as a self-made man who studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya, Surat, and knows no English, but Khan maintains a fine gruffness.

The market manipulation and stock skulduggery in Baazaar is childish, but that doesn’t stop Chawla borrowing from masterworks like The Big Short. There is a reason the guy breaking the fourth wall in that film was the incomparably dashing Ryan Gosling. With Mehra, the flatness hurts.