Haivaan Isn’t Really an Akshay Kumar Film — And That’s the Problem

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Marketed around its biggest star, Haivaan quietly hands its story to Saif Ali Khan while remaking a 2016 Malayalam thriller almost frame for frame. The result raises a sharper question than whether the film works — it asks who it was actually made for.

Based on Buzz around the movie We have consolidated what has been reported to studio by those who saw the movie and had words flowing as review of the film .

Somewhere between the poster and the projector, Haivaan changes its mind about what kind of film it wants to be.

The marketing sells an Akshay Kumar vehicle. The screen delivers something closer to a Saif Ali Khan character study, wrapped inside a near scene-for-scene remake of the 2016 Malayalam thriller Opam, directed then and now by Priyadarshan. Audiences walking in expecting Kumar to anchor the film may find him present for what amounts to three or four scenes in the first ninety minutes — a role that functions less like a lead performance and more like an extended cameo, deployed mainly to jolt the film awake whenever its pacing threatens to put viewers to sleep.

That’s not a minor marketing quibble. It’s the central tension the film never resolves.

A Remake Without Reinvention

Haivaan is not loosely inspired by Opam. It is, by most accounts from those who’ve seen both, a direct transplant — same structure, same character dynamics, same central mystery involving two blind men, one who lost his sight and one who chose blindness after witnessing something unbearable, bound together by a child both are fighting over for opposite reasons. Priyadarshan directed the original and directs this one, which makes the lack of adaptation harder to explain away as unfamiliarity with the material. Reportedly even dialogue beats and specific plot furniture carry over largely unchanged.

The practical consequence is that anyone who has already seen Opam — available in a Hindi-dubbed version on YouTube — has little reason to buy a ticket. There is no reinterpretation on offer, no new lens, no updated stakes. Just a different cast wearing the same story, stretched from the original’s roughly two-hour runtime to nearly two hours and forty-four minutes.

That extra length is where the film’s other core problem lives. A slow-burn opening built on suspense and psychological tension is a legitimate genre choice — Priyadarshan clearly wants viewers reading faces and second-guessing motives rather than watching fights. But the patience required to get through an unhurried first half, padded further by songs that add little and comic detours that add less, may test even a sympathetic audience. For a thriller, tension is the currency, and tension dissipates when the film seems unsure how much of its runtime it’s allowed to spend building toward very little.

Where The Film Actually Works

Credit where it’s due: the scenes that do land are the ones between the two blind men, staged with deliberately minimal lighting and a score that leans into dread rather than spectacle. It’s old-fashioned suspense filmmaking, and in isolated stretches it works exactly as intended.

Most of that success rests on Saif Ali Khan, playing the role originated by Mohanlal in the original film. Reactions suggest he’s the film’s most consistently praised element — not necessarily because the writing gives him new dimensions, but because he commits to a physically and emotionally demanding part with restraint rather than showmanship. Whether that’s enough to satisfy 2026 audiences the way it satisfied 2016 audiences is a separate question. A twist that felt fresh a decade ago, before remake fatigue and instant access to the source film, may land as predictable rather than clever this time around.

Akshay Kumar’s presence complicates this rather than strengthening it. His character is positioned, at least on paper, as a menacing, near-mythic threat — the kind of role a title like Haivaan implies belongs to him. Revealing his face early, rather than preserving the mystery the original apparently maintained for a majority of its runtime, undercuts that intent before it has a chance to build. What’s left is a recognisable star delivering a handful of scenes with more voice than action, asked to generate fear through presence alone in a script that gives him almost nothing to actually do.

Expectation Versus Delivery

Here’s where audience psychology matters. A film sold on a marquee name creates a specific contract with its audience — that name will carry meaningful weight in the story. When that contract is broken, the disappointment isn’t really about screen time. It’s about feeling misled by the poster.

That’s a marketing failure as much as a creative one, and it’s worth separating the two. Kumar’s reduced role isn’t inherently a flaw — supporting a genuinely strong thriller from the margins can be a legitimate creative choice. The flaw is packaging that choice as something else entirely, then handing audiences a film whose first half tests their patience before the deception is even apparent.

Studio Perspective

The more interesting failure here isn’t really about any single performance. It’s about a director revisiting his own material a decade later and treating that as sufficient justification on its own — without asking whether a story that worked as a modest, character-driven mystery in 2016 needed anything new to justify existing again in 2026, especially with its original Hindi-dubbed version a free click away.

Remaking your own film isn’t inherently a problem. Plenty of filmmakers have returned to earlier ideas with sharper tools and better instincts. What’s harder to defend is doing so with apparently zero creative reinvestment — same locations, same beats, same reveals — while asking a considerably larger budget and considerably bigger stars to carry material that hasn’t been rethought for the audience receiving it now.

That’s arguably the real story underneath Haivaan’s mixed word of mouth and reportedly muted theatrical turnout. It isn’t that the central mystery is badly conceived — Opam evidently wasn’t a masterpiece to begin with, just a solid, modest thriller. It’s that a film built entirely on faithful repetition offers audiences almost nothing they couldn’t get elsewhere, for free, in less time, minus the confusion of wondering why the biggest name on the poster barely shows up in the film.

Whether that’s a failure of nerve, of marketing, or simply of imagination is hard to say definitively. But it leaves behind a question worth sitting with: when a studio remakes a film scene for scene and calls in major stars to sell it, is the audience being offered a new experience — or just a more expensive way to watch something that already exists?

— Studio CarryOnHarry Editorial Desk

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