film review: Pawns and princes

In chess, as in life, practice makes you perfect. It was Malcolm Gladwell who popularized the '10,000 hour rule' in his 2008 bestseller, 'Outliers.' Its gist is that to get good at anything that involves willful practice—everything from public speaking to writing to playing basketball and chess—you should have practiced the discipline for at least 10,000 hours. This amounts to a shade under three hours of daily practice, every single day, for 10 years. And so it is that the old and wheelchair-bound Pandit Omkar Dhar (Amitabh Bachchan), after three or four decades of uninterrupted chess-playing, is a grandmaster.

And which is why Danish Ali (Farhan Akhtar), an officer with Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), who has perhaps only intermittently dabbled in the game previously, gets easily beaten by Dhar's chess students as young as 10 years old. But slowly, under close guidance of Dhar, Ali improves and is soon gleefully beating the tiny tots. But what makes Ali, an ATS officer, come and play chess at Dhar's home?


Grief over lost loved ones unites the two men. Dhar has lost his wife (and both his legs) in a freak car accident; and his sole (grown up) daughter has died, too. Likewise, the life of Ali, a happily settled police officer, comes unstuck when his daughter is killed during a shootout with terrorists. His wife Ruhana (Aditi Rao Hydari) blames Ali for the little girl's death; she wouldn't have died if Ali had not recklessly pursued some terrorists in his car with his daughter in the back seat. Ruhana cannot easily forgive Ali and goes to live with her parents.

Ali then finds out that Dhar had been teaching chess to his young daughter before her death in the shootout. Dhar and Ali, two grief-stricken men, hit it off instantly. Soon Ali is learning chess from the grandmaster. While doing so, he also learns about Dhar's deceased daughter: Dhar does not think his daughter died naturally. He believes that there has been a systematic cover-up. But an aging Dhar who is confined to his wheelchair is helpless. So Ali decides to look into the suspicious death on his behalf.

What Ali finds out in the process forms the meat of the story of 'Wazir'—'a minister' in Arabic or, alternately, a fairy chess piece. Director Bejoy Nambiar's latest offering is neat, to almost surgical precision: at 104-minutes it is the perfect length for a psychological thriller. The audience feels intensely involved from the opening scene; bat an eyelid and you might miss something important.

Bachchan puts in a masterful performance, looking the part in his role of a chess grandmaster. As the film's producers have said, if there was no Bachchan, there would be no 'Wazir.' It is, likewise, hard to find a flaw with Farhan Akhtar's (at times intense) role as an ATS officer. He pulls it off effortlessly. Hydari, in her role as Ruhana, also puts in a convincing performance.

As anyone who has ever played chess knows, one wrong move and the game's over. The difference between the seemingly powerless pieces (pawns) and the mighty ones (King or Queen) can be rendered moot by a clever player. 'Wazir' is this story of chess, of the backdoor triumph of the weak over the mighty. All in all, a thorough weekend entertainment.

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