Ratings:2/5 Review By: Renuka Vyavahare Site:Times of India (TOI)
Ratings:1/5 Review By: Sushant Singh Site:India Today
Ratings:0/5 Review By: Mohar Basu Site:Koimoi
Those who are not hooked onto Hollywood films won't mind watching (former actor) Kamal Sadanah's ambitious directorial debut, which can be applauded for its novelty and decent VFX. Kamal has dared to make an animal-centric thriller, a genre unexplored in Bollywood. You can still watch the film if you are obsessed with the Sundarbans or the tigers (in that order).However, the excessively weak story acts as a major spoiler. Even as a survival thriller, it fails to hold your attention. For how long can visuals make up for a drab story?Visit Site for more
Ratings:1/5 Review By: Sushant Singh Site:India Today
While it is commendable and also daring on Sadanah and Rizvi's part to set and shoot a film in the Sundarbans, one wishes they'd invested as much time in developing an engaging story as they did on the visual effects.A friend summed it up best. "The audience will need tiger balm after seeing Roar."Visit Site for more
Ratings:0/5 Review By: Mohar Basu Site:Koimoi
Roar is such a bad film that despite going in with no expectations, it
shocks you at being utterly stupid. It’s a shamelessly lazy film and
comes with no merits of its own. This film stinks of un-intelligence and
sheer lameness and is pretty much a time waste for any cinegoer unless
you desire to get stoned and trip on a horrid film.
This Friday, we have two movies hitting and one of them is Roar, starring all the novices including Abhinav Shukla, Himarsha Venkatsamy,
Achint Kaur, Subrat Dutta, Nora Fatehi, etc. This feature movie is
directed and written by Kamal Sadanah, who is doing his debut
directorial venture, while it is produced by Abiz Rizvi under the banner
of his own company Abiz Rizvi Films. The music comes from John Stewart
BGM, while Michael Watson carried out the task of Cinematography. The
movie has loads of newcomers and novices, which means it has no higher
star value, which can make the ball rolling over the box office,
however, critically it can be applauded for experimenting on an
untouched subject and a gripping subject.
Now, let’s check the plot of the movie. In one sentence, it is all about
the Tigers of Sunderbans wherein you find a tumultuous kind of
relationship between man and the beast. As we dig deeper, we find a
young photojournalist called Uday who is on his assignment to click some
pictures at Sundarbans. There he recues a white tiger cub found in the
trap of a poacher and brings the cub back to his place wherein he is
based at. Soon the panic dominates the village and in order to settle
down this fuss, the forest officer takes away the cub. Then you have the
entry of Royal Bengal Tigress who follows the bloodstains of the cub
and reaches out to Uday’s place but on not finding the cub she kills the
young photographer and vanishes away with the dead body. Soon you have
Pundit the captain of elite military commando team, who happens to be
Uday’s brother comes into picture to find out the dead body of his
brother. However, he gets no support from the forest officer for having a
complex forest ecology in order to find his brother’s dead body. He
moves on his own venture with his elite commando team to find his
brother’s dead body amidst all emotions and rage. Whether he finds out
the dead body or not is interesting to note and how is his encounter
with Royal Bengal Tigress can be worth watching.
In nutshell, Roar simply revolves the battle between man and the beast.
At least, this is what you can find out after watching this two hour
based movie. Amidst the fight for avenge, you could find the team moving
through the thorny, swampy, green and lush locations. Soon, you see the
hunted becoming the hunter. And at the end, you would see all the
humans losing their lives while the tigers roar is winning the game. The
movie Roar makes hardly any sense in it. It is really unnerving to note
why the writer and director simply decided to turn the orange and
reddish tiger into white especially when everyone is seen claiming that
there is hardly any white tiger in West Bengal or Bangladesh. They took
resort in Computer generated images to have white tigers perhaps to get
exotic value, which they have failed miserably. The group going inside
the jungles with two women with cleavage really killed the real essence
of the movie. The script is seen with too many loopholes, which has no
answer for the audience.
Now, let’s check the performance
department. Well, again the animal seems to be winning than the humans
found in the movie. You would find the tiger with bloody mouth and
electric blue eyes seem more smart than the hapless and revenge hungry
human beings in it. All the lead roles in the movie happen to be novices
and you cannot expect much from them except the few who also failed to
impress the audience with their performance. Roping in the ace
Cinematographer – Michael Watson was a wise decision though, but more
often, this man was seen overdoing things especially while taking the
top angles shots. Yet the sylvan Sundarbans shots captured with the
quality of National Geographic Special effects then it really becomes
worth watching. The music and other technical things are okay though not
par yet cannot be called as ordinary ones. However, the editing part of
the movie was too frivolous since it simply made the movie very much
difficult to watch.
Roar Review Last Word :
Though it may be commendable efforts to
see the filmmaker Rizvi and Sadanah making a movie based at Sundarbans,
however, they failed to embark with some engaging story as much of the
stuff was carried out using special visual effects. Their exciting and
arduous experience of shooting somewhere in Bangladesh across the
Sundarbans could have proved worthy for them, but for audience it really
means nothing. All in all, the filmmaker failed to give something
tangible rather than few good quality motion pictures, which anyone can
enjoy watching the National Geographic or Animal Planate channels, so
whats the use of watching a movie simply to catch a mindless avenge game
of the lead character pundit.