Some films return because they have a story left to tell. Others return because they want to revisit a memory. Awarapan 2 sits somewhere in between—revisiting a 2007 film that underperformed theatrically but slowly acquired a second life on television, streaming platforms and through Emraan Hashmi’s enduring image as Shivam Pandit. Nearly two decades later, the sequel continues that story while also serving as a re-entry into its mood.
The commercial logic is easy enough to understand. Bring back Shivam, the brooding gangster and wounded lover who became one of Hashmi’s most recognisable avatars, and put the actor back at the centre of a violent crime drama. This is Hashmi returning to the kind of role that defined much of his heyday. The nostalgia is real, underlined by a soundtrack that also harks back to the early 2000s. And now, with time and experience, Hashmi brings a real tactility and pathos to Shivam, particularly in Toh Phir Aao, Pritam’s composition from Awarapan.
We were meant to believe Shivam had died at the end of the 2007 film, taking seven bullets after losing the love of his life, Aliyah. But in the world of Awarapan 2, he is alive, having apparently been rescued and healed by monks. That is more or less the explanation. There is no meaningful account of how he survived or what happened during those intervening years. The enormous narrative jump feels less like a dramatic revelation and more like a screenplay convenience.
Directed by Nitin Kakkar, the sequel is mounted on a larger canvas, with Rajasthan and Bangkok providing attractive locations for what evolves into an international crime thriller. Shivam becomes embroiled in a child-trafficking operation involving Interpol officer Samar Singh (Atul Kumar). Shivam has a personal and emotional stake in the operation, setting him on a dangerous trail that leads into the drug trade, rival gangs and an international crime network operating out of Bangkok. Yet the child-trafficking track keeps disappearing beneath drug wars, romance and an elaborate family drama involving a tyrannical, unstable son and his two siblings.
The kidnapped child who ought to drive the narrative becomes almost incidental. There is surprisingly little urgency to finding her, while characters, especially Shivam, acquire information and accomplish things with suspicious ease. He can infiltrate one gang and then conveniently locate a lady don’s hideout; he earns trust and falls in love while simultaneously dealing with suspicious henchmen. The film has plenty of action, but not always enough causality. It repeatedly gives the impression that the visual surface—camerawork, locations, lights and colours, songs and fight sequences—has been worked on more carefully than the story underneath it.
The screenplay rarely develops its supporting characters, despite an interesting cast. Suvinder Vicky plays Jaideep, the long-time bodyguard and henchman of family patriarch Amrit Singh, whose loyalty eventually puts him in the path of the maniacal heir Zorawar, played by Puran Gabbi.
Shabana Azmi’s Nafisa is plot-critical, but the character is given so little space that we get neither a sense of where she comes from nor where she is headed. Disha Patani’s Zara, Aniruddh Rawal’s Sikander and Gabbi’s Zorawar are siblings in a dysfunctional family shaped by violence and fear. There is little room in this criminal household for a cello-playing sister or an autistic brother. Zara’s cello is almost an emblem of her misplaced existence: she belongs to a world of music and feeling, but has been born into a home where power and violence are the only currency. In this family, the person with the gun is the one with the power. Inevitably, the two wounded, brooding adults, with cello and gun respectively, are attracted to one another.
Zorawar is a villain who seems to have wandered into the wrong movie. In a film where people tend to kill first and speak only when necessary, he is extraordinarily high-energy and verbose. He rants, explains and performs menace with his whole body. The mismatch in pitch can be exhausting.
Hashmi, meanwhile, remains entirely comfortable as Shivam. He understands that the character works through wounded quietness, and there is an undeniable pleasure in seeing him inhabit this persona again. But Awarapan 2 reconstructs the idea of Emraan Hashmi as Shivam—the brooding hero, gangster, wounded lover, redemption-seeker—without constructing either emotional or procedural coherence around him.
At 140 minutes, there are shootings, betrayals and rescues, but surprisingly little urgency. The child-trafficking plot should supply the stakes, Shivam’s unexplained survival and his attempt to bring down the crime racket should supply the narrative momentum and his return should give the sequel a reason to exist. Instead, these threads are diluted by everything else the film wants to be.
Awarapan 2 remembers Shivam. It just doesn’t quite know what to do with him once it has brought him back.
‘Awarapan 2’ is in theatres.
Udita Jhunjhunwala is a Goa-based writer and curator.