Emraan Hashmi does this weird thing with his lower jaw in the first half of Azhar that I am still trying to figure out. He juts it forward whenever the character is supposed to look resolute, which happens a lot because Mohammad Azharuddin’s life as depicted here is a nonstop parade of trials, tribunals, and tearful confrontations. Tony D'rizah's direction leans heavily on these courtroom standoffs, shooting them through a murky blue filter that makes everyone look like they are broadcasting from inside a damp refrigerator. It is not great, not bad, just there. The film wants desperately to rehabilitate the former Indian cricket captain from the match-fixing scandal that derailed his career, framing him as a misunderstood patriot who trusted the wrong people and loved too deeply to survive the ruthless machinery of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. That is a heavy lift for a standard commercial Bollywood production that also has to squeeze in musical numbers and melodramatic domestic squabbles.

The screenplay by Rajat Arora operates on the assumption that subtlety is an insult to the audience's intelligence. Every single emotional beat arrives accompanied by a thunderous string crescendo on the soundtrack, signaling precisely how you are supposed to feel about Azhar's moral purity while he stares soulfully into the middle distance. There is a recurring visual motif involving a silver cricket bat given to him by his grandfather that gets handled with such heavy-handed reverence you half expected it to start glowing in the dark. Hashmi tries his best to inject some genuine vulnerability into the proceedings, shedding his serial-kisser reputation through sheer earnestness, but the writing keeps pulling him back into hagiography. When he hits a cover drive, the camera slows down so excessively you can practically calculate the rotational velocity of the ball. It is exhausting. Nargis Fakhri plays Sangeeta Bijlani under a heavy layer of gloss, and her line delivery often feels like she is reading phonetic spellings off a cue card placed just slightly to the right of the lens. Prachi Desai fares better as Naureen, the first wife who gets sidelined for a glamorous Bollywood starlet, bringing a quiet dignity to scenes that are otherwise drowning in shouting matches and weeping relatives.

There is a small thing about the costume design that bugged me throughout the second half. Whenever Azhar is slouching through hotel lobbies or giving press conferences in the late nineties, his leather jackets are just a bit too modern, cut with a slim fit that didn't exist in 1999. It pulls you right out of the period recreation, much like the patchy CGI used to populate the cricket stadiums with cheering crowds that look like they were rendered on a heavily taxed home computer. The cinematography by Rakesh Singh alternates between hyper-stylized slow motion during the match sequences and frantic handheld camera work during the interrogation scenes, giving the whole enterprise a jarring visual schizophrenia. You can sense the frantic editing room compromise between telling a sports biopic and defending a man's honor in the court of public opinion. Match fixing is brushed past with the narrative equivalent of a nervous cough, shifting the blame entirely onto shady bookies and a vengeful manager rather than exploring the gray areas that made the actual scandal so compelling to follow in the papers.

Comparing this to something like Neeraj Pandey's MS Dhoni: The Untold Story reveals just how much dramatic lift is lost when a biopic refuses to let its subject have any real flaws. Azharuddin comes across as a saint who only ever wanted to make his grandfather proud and kiss lockets while walking out to the crease, completely sanitized of the complex contradictions that define real human beings. The supporting cast features a rotating gallery of caricatures who exist solely to either betray him or applaud his resilience. Lara Dutta pops up as a sharp-tongued lawyer in a pantsuit, delivering legal arguments with the kind of theatrical bombast usually reserved for high court dramas from the eighties. Her clashes with the prosecution are staged with zero regard for actual courtroom procedure, favoring theatrical pauses and dramatic camera pans over anything resembling realistic litigation. The film wants to be a legal thriller, a sports drama, and a tragic romance all at once, resulting in a bloated runtime where entire subplots about religious identity and media persecution are introduced, chewed on for ten minutes, and then abandoned without a resolution.

Hindi cinema has always struggled with the biopic format because the industry prefers myth-making over psychological depth, and this project is no exception to that frustrating rule. The soundtrack, composed by a committee of different artists, throws generic romantic ballads at the screen whenever the pacing flags, hoping that Emraan Hashmi and Nargis Fakhri running through rain-soaked streets will make you forget that the plot has completely stalled. It doesn't work. The songs feel bolted onto a narrative that was already buckling under the weight of its own defensive agenda. By the time the closing titles roll with actual footage of the real Azharuddin hugging the director on set, the feeling is less one of catharsis and more of relief that the ordeal is finally over. The film asks you to forgive a man who was banned for life, yet it never really trusts you enough to show you what he actually did wrong in the first place.