'Aamir' is a small movie but has plenty to offer to its audience. Its director Raj Kumar Gupta is new, but has proved his worth in his debut. The protagonist played by Rajiv Khandelwal attracts wide applause from the viewers as well as the critics though he doesn't belong to the big star category. The movie is different in many respects: It has no heroine kind of a character nor does it contain regular formula of a romance, song and dance track or an item number. The movie is without much-hyped foreign or domestic locales shooting. The director has justly shot the Mumbai city's dingy lanes and bye-lanes that are too crowded to move about; small and cheap eating houses and hotels, besides all the dirt the city has.
After all, Aamir goes through it in the few hours of a day! The credit for all this goes to the proper handling of the subject by Raj Kumar Gupta. Yes, he wouldn't have been successful without the support from his other departments like the cinematography by Alphonse Roy and background score by Amit Trivedi, apart from tight editing and just screenplay. Among its anonymous cast, Rajeev lends full support to the director by his excellent performance inasmuch in emoting like a troubled common man. Gajrao Rao performs equally well as the vicious villain.
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According to the story, 'Aamir' meaning leader takes off as a thriller about a common man forced into criminal exploitation in the course of a day. This is about Aamir Ali who lands on the Mumbai airport coming back home from London and when he finds his family missing to receive at the airport; he goes to the nearby PCO and makes a call back home. Two men on a bicycle throw a cell phone at him and the phone starts ringing and Aamir is forced to do follow instructions given on the cell phone because his family has been kidnapped by the caller, a terrorist group.
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Rajeev Khandelwal who plays the lead character of Aamir has been turned a scapegoat by an extremist group to indulge in the worst crime. So, he has to move in the lanes and by-lanes of Mumbai city as instructed by the terrorist group with no clue about their mission. Before he comes to know about his assignment, he has already been involved in a bombing conspiracy.
Though the basic premise of the film is the same as in 'Black and White', 'Shaurya', 'Hope and a Little Sugar' the movie doesn't attempt to give a lesson to its viewers. The director presumes that his predecessors have already dealt on the subject through their ventures.
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On the whole, 'Aamir' has indeed succeeded unlike other contemporary movies. As said earlier, the movie is meant for appealing to the minds rather than the hearts of the audience. The movie is worth a watch. After all, it shows how a common man from London can help a big city like Mumbai from the clutches of terrorist-the enemies of the humanity.
