Haadsa is a film directed by Akbar Khan. It is supposed to be a thriller but it just fails to impress in all accounts. The script is badly written, the dialogues are very poor, and Khan's direction is not good, though the story could have worked had it been directed by a more experienced and competent director. But there is one reason to watch the film, and it is Smita Patil. She plays Asha, a mentally unstable woman who is also sexually frustrated because of her old husband's impotence. Her meeting with a motor mechanic named Jai makes her believe it is her childhood friend Guddu (for whom she even killed her alcoholic stepmother). There starts an affair and Asha keeps chasing him everywhere. Jai, however, has no interest in the weird Asha, and later falls for a girl named Robby, who is also the daughter of Asha's psychiatrist. But an obsessed Asha would not leave it at that. This good story was unfortunately too amateurishly done at places, and some sequences were really unbearable. The film's music does not work either, and the romance between Jai and Robby is totally unconvincing. However, as already mentioned, Smita Patil's performance really elevates the level of the otherwise boring film. She does the best of her obsessive, mentally ill and frustrated Asha, a role which in itself is not that well written either. She looks really sizzling in some scenes and raises above the poor script with her impressive and disturbing act. Akbar Khan is average in his role, Amrish Puri is hardly there, Ashok Kumar is wasted, and Ranjeeta looks ravishing but she too is wasted. Haadsa is watchable to an extent for Smita Patil, but she too could not make it good enough to be worthy of even a one-time watch.
