Apurva

The whole premise of the kidnapping was weak. Secondly, 3 comedians don't make great villainous characters. Rajpal Yadav with his diminutive stature and personality wasn't convincing as a bad guy. As for the rest of the gang, at any point they didn't seem threatening enough to overpower the victim. Dialogues were pedestrian at best. If you have seen NH10 you wouldn't be overly impressed with this version. Tara was no Anushka, you required a bit more mature personality to pull off this role. Some scenes were obviously manufactured just for thrills. There is a whole wilderness for the bad guys to search for their escaped victim, but inspite of not having any clue, they always seemed to be in the vicinity of the victim. They surely must have some kind of extra sensory perception. The frantic fiance always seemed to be a day late in his rescue attempt so was basically useless to the plot. The good thing about the movie is that the director knew the limitation of the script and the actors and didn't prolong it unnecessarily.

A crime thriller with story revolving around a survival drama of a girl n similar to NH10 movie but NH10 was very intense than this. But definitely worth a watch for it being a winning story. That struggle of a very ordinary girl to escape by withholding her composure in that horrifying situation is inspiring. It's not dragged unnecessarily, short n crisp with last 30 minutes with nail baiting scenes. Actors have performed quite well. But screenplay could have been even more intense n impactful. Available on Disney Hotstar. My ratings 6/10!

A crime thriller with story revolving around a survival drama of a girl n similar to NH10 movie but NH10 was very intense than this. But definitely worth a watch for it being a winning story. That struggle of a very ordinary girl to escape by withholding her composure in that horrifying situation is inspiring. It's not dragged unnecessarily, short n crisp with last 30 minutes with nail baiting scenes. Actors have performed quite well. But screenplay could have been even more intense n impactful. Available on Disney Hotstar. My ratings 6/10!

Apurva is the story of a girl named Apurva who gets kidnapped by a gang of four gangsters and how she manages to escape from their clutches is the main story . It basically carries the NH10 flavors in it.

Apurva starts off extremely well. The four gangsters played by Rajpal Yadav, Abhishek Bannerjee, Sumit Gulati and Aditya are introduced as goons who enjoy watching people dying, screaming in pain , crying etc . A sense of terror is well established at the start. This continues for the whole of first half when Apurva gets kidnapped.

However, from the second half onwards, the film dips. Not only does it become a bit repetitive but it feels Apurva is managing to outfox the goons pretty easily. Repetitive because it just involves a hide and seek game in one location (which gave me Honeycomb maze vibes from Takeshi's castle) and it seemed the goons don't put forward the best effort possible to search.

The goons also don't pose any major challenge to Apurva and hence Apurva manages to outfox them pretty easily. This was something i did not like at all. I felt the challenges posed could be greater.

Like I said performance wise everyone including Tara Sutaria have done a great job. In fact this is the first time Tara gets to feature in a proper meaty no-nonsense role. It's definitely visible that she's worked hard for the role of Apurva which genuinely needed some grit.

There's a lot of gory scenes in the film. The shots taken of blood and flesh were pretty disturbing.

Dhairya as Apurva's finance is a waste. At the end you will realise he's there for nothing. His parts in the present timeline could have easily been chopped off.

Overall, a decent one time watch. A better second half treatment could have made the film to NH10's level.

The trailer looked really nice. So, I decided to watch this movie. After completing this movie, I am numb. Meaning, I am neither happy, nor angry. The movie story went straightforward. We already knew what was going to happen to the main character as it was already shown in the trailer. I just wanted to see the way the character would do that. The writing was really bad. However, it will keep you engaged for most parts. The ending was incomplete. The writer didn't told us about the aftermath of the incident after the lead character returns. Like, they didn't revealed anything about the goons, no actions were taken against the people who hired them, or they couldn't take the actions, in the story of the movie, none of that was mentioned. So, this is an incomplete movie and I felt numb after watching that. However, I'm a fan of Rajpal Yadav and he did really well. One of the guy in the movie with the glasses and beard, the final villain also did great performance. So, that it, 6 out of 10.

This was indeed a surprise package. I was expecting a shoddily done half baked crime thriller movie which sort of has been the 'speciality' of Disney HotStar in recent times. But luckily this wasn't the case with Apurva. First of all, the cinematography of the movie is top notch. It has been shot on real locations and the scenes are brilliantly shot. Even the BGM is good, it's not overdone.

But the main reason why this was such a good watch was because of the three menacing characters played by Abhishek Banerjee, Sumit Gulati and of course Rajpal Yadav as 'Jugnoo'. They ooze terror throughout the movie. It was great to see Rajpal Yadav doing a dark and negative role and he aced it. He's such a versatile actor. Also the movie keeps you on the edge of the seat throughout but the story and the plot is similar to NH10 starring Anushka Sharma.

Some of the negative aspects are continuity issues in some place, the actors not speaking in the chambal accent and few stretched scenes here and there.

Overall a good watch. Highly recommended.