Haiwaan Movie Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Haiwaan reunites Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan after 18 years, but a stretched-out script and Akshay’s oddly off menace keep this crime thriller from ever truly gripping the audience.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Genre: Crime Thriller
Runtime: Around 160 minutes
Director: Priyadarshan
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Boman Irani, Saiyami Kher
Haiwaan brings Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan together on screen for the first time in eighteen years, and that reunion alone is enough to make plenty of viewers curious. Unfortunately, curiosity is about as far as the excitement goes here.
The film’s biggest problem is its screenplay, a thin, stretched-out script that struggles to hold attention across a runtime of roughly 160 minutes, with the second half in particular becoming a genuine test of patience.
The story follows Shyam, played by Saif Ali Khan, a visually impaired man working in the maintenance department of an upscale high-rise in South Mumbai, where he has also become an informal caretaker many residents rely on. A retired judge named Pradhan, played by Boman Irani, shares a close bond with Shyam and often turns to him for help with everyday tasks.
During a drive together, Pradhan recounts an old case involving a man named Parshuram, played by Akshay Kumar, who was convicted of rape and served seven years in prison while always maintaining his innocence. Now out of jail, Parshuram has begun killing people connected to his case, and the judge is next on his list.
The opening stretch does a solid job establishing a genuinely serious tone, promising a crime thriller with some real bite. That tone starts to unravel the moment Akshay Kumar’s character enters the picture, as clunky dialogue and an oddly persistent laugh attached to his character pull the film away from the menace it is trying to build.
Director Priyadarshan, who has handled weighty material with real confidence in films like Virasat and Kanchivaram, seems to be missing that same assurance here, and the film too often simply asks viewers to accept things without properly earning that trust.
Much of the premise is genuinely hard to swallow. There is no real explanation for Shyam’s almost superhuman instincts, given that despite being blind, he can stop a ball from hitting a young girl in a split second and take on four policemen single-handedly.
Parshuram is similarly puzzling, described as a small town man despite neither his look nor his mannerisms supporting that backstory. Akshay Kumar’s performance does not help matters either, since his laughter and exaggerated mannerisms repeatedly undercut the sense of threat the character is supposed to carry.
Saif Ali Khan comes out of this reunion in noticeably better shape. His performance as Shyam is honest and restrained, making the character believable even when the writing does not give him much to work with. Boman Irani brings solid credibility to his role as the retired judge, and Saiyami Kher, playing a cop, delivers some of the film’s more convincing moments.
Shriya Pilgaonkar, Sharib Hashmi, and Rajesh Sharma round out a dependable supporting cast. The central cat-and-mouse dynamic between Shyam and Parshuram should have been the film’s biggest strength, but it drags on far too long, eventually becoming tedious rather than tense.
Scenes keep stretching out exactly when the story should be building momentum, making it hard not to think back to Priyadarshan’s sharper, more confident earlier work. A late appearance by Mohanlal as another visually impaired character only adds to the confusion, since it is genuinely difficult to figure out what his presence actually adds to the story at that point.
By the time Haiwaan reaches its ending, it has already burned through most of its goodwill, and the finale does little to win any of it back. Given the star power involved here, it is worth wondering just how much this ambitious reunion actually cost to put together, and this breakdown of the cast salaries and overall movie budget offers a closer look at those numbers.