Cast: Akshay Kumar, Ayesha Takia
Director: Nagesh Kukunoor
Rating: 2/5

The hero of this film has a mystique ability to gaze at photographs and visualize immediate happenings after the picture was clicked. How one wishes the viewer had similar superpowers of seeing scenes from this film by just gaping at its poster thereby avoiding foreseeable hazard.

Jai (Akshay Kumar) is a forest officer in Canada who snoozes at the sight of snaps, his pulse rate drops and blood from his body evaporates in thin air. All this to envision the future tense of the clicked image! The director however chooses to impose the action image of Akshay Kumar over explaining the supernatural gift of this character. So as Jai jumps off cliffs, the film begins to slide down from start.

Just when you expect the film to open up as a supernatural thriller through Jai’s vision, Nagesh Kukunoor changes your viewpoint turning the film into a conventional who-dun-it murder mystery drama. His father drowns to death and Jai smells (rather sees) something fishy. A self-appointed detective (Javed Jaffrey) strongly believes the death to be a murder though there isn’t the weakest of evidence implying so.

To avoid additional efforts to script an intriguing crime thriller, Kukunoor opts the easy way out of employing Jai’s photographic foresight to unearth clues for cracking the case. Jai stares at a foursome photo clicked just before his father’s death and envisages the ensuing death scene through each person’s version and vision, falling in momentary naps. By the time he dozes for the fourth time, the viewer is already in slumber.

Habitually, you ignore the usual suspects and expect the unsuspected person to be the killer. While you aren’t wrong on that front, Kukunoor attempts to add an extra twist with the killer’s identity which falls flat terribly. The climax is agonizingly stretched and beyond acceptance.

The basic idea of visualizing through photographs was interesting enough but unfortunately Nagesh Kukunoor lacked the vision of exploiting it effectively. Despite the suspense genre, there are no tense or thrilling moments and the screenplay has a lax and laidback approach. Rather redundant scenes are filmed to accommodate brand endorsements of concealed camera and security locks that are not key to the plot.

The performances stand by the title, Tasveer – still and ineffective. After long you see Akshay Kumar in a non-comic character but he doesn’t impress much. Not because of the image-change but for the bland story. Ayesha Takia seems on a Canadian holiday. Javed Jaffrey gives a few redeeming moments in his half-baked character and full-on Hyderabadi accent.

Reportedly Nagesh Kukunoor appealed critics to not divulge the ending of the film in their reviews. The question is how many will actually sit till the end.

The film neither works as a murder mystery nor as an X-File kinda supernatural thriller. Tasveer just doesn’t click with the viewer!

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