If it was good then why did Priyadarshan remake it, and if i

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

“If it was good then why did Priyadarshan remake it, and if it was good then why did he make it like this?” — Harry Johal

There’s a real question buried in these reviews that goes beyond bad filmmaking. When you remake your own film shot-for-shot, you’re not just being lazy — you’re saying something about how you view your audience. You’re betting they won’t notice, or won’t care, or won’t have access to the original. That’s contempt dressed up as commerce.

But what’s more interesting to me is what happened to Akshay Kumar’s choice here. Both reviewers agree his performance has moments, but he’s been relegated to a supporting role in his own film. That’s not a creative accident. That’s a structural collapse. You hire two of your biggest stars, you give one of them a blind character with all this potential — the sensory compensation, the daredevil physicality — and then you don’t actually use any of it. You just have him stand there and look intense.

The real failure isn’t that Haivaan is a bad remake. It’s that Priyadarshan didn’t remake anything. He copied. There’s a difference between honoring an original and duplicating it, and somewhere in that gap is where actual filmmaking happens. These reviewers watched a film that forgot to cross that gap.

Editor’s Thought Of The Moment — Harry Johal, Studio CarryOnHarry