A film’s opening image tells you almost everything you need to know about the content. Purist filmmakers (the kind that stick like superglue to narrative form), or those shrewd enough are bound by habit to ground the film’s tone into the audience from the first frame — let alone a shot. Often, the opening image is reflected by a closing image, which culminates a character’s or a narrative’s journey. Classic examples include Citizen Kane and Gone Girl.

In director Hassan Waqas Rana’s Yalghaar, the opening image comes before the film in a boldly written citation — a tenacious dedication to ISPR and the Armed Forces of Pakistan. The tone, and one’s expectation, is fixed in stone like the Excalibur at this point. His closing image does not culminate the film’s narrative, it instead salutes the heroes of the country … again.

Rana, like every Pakistani filmmaker, would not want his filmmaking skills compared to international directors — this is his debut film as a director, and second as a producer and screenwriter after Waar. He shouldn’t be worried. The propagandist nature of the citation, epilogue and the content, especially in war movies, is also a norm in Hollywood.

Yalghaar claims to be the most expensive film ever made in Pakistan. Unfortunately it doesn’t show on screen

Rana, though, tries to make Yalghaar the best three-hour ‘join the army’ commercial possible. Like Waar, Yalghaar starts on an intense sprint. The camera, anxious and aware of a looming emergency, opens on an army operation in progress. Zipping through locations and following actors, we tag behind them like a nervous secretary. A satellite image locks in on a silent, remote location of broken bricks and 100-watt Tungsten bulbs.

A tactical unit zeros in and a group of SSGs skydive into the night, after a rallying speech from their commander. A Nighthawk helicopter’s pilot tries to lighten the mood with humour: “(Pakistan Army) Great people to fly with,” he says in the tone of an airline pilot.

The coordinated stealth attack ends on a fake bullet-time effect (the slow-motion bullet-dodging shots from The Matrix). Ripping through blazing muzzle flashes and falling bodies frozen in time, the sequence is near-about brilliant. Now, if only Rana could fill the rest of Yalghaar with such cinematic zeal.

Rana, though, tries to make Yalghaar the best three-hour ‘join the army’ commercial possible. Like Waar, Yalghaar starts on an intense sprint. The camera, anxious and aware of a looming emergency, opens on an army operation in progress. Zipping through locations and following actors, we tag behind them like a furrowed secretary.

Yalghaar’s biggest flaw is inherited from Waar — an absence of weight-on-paper. The screenplay by Rana focuses on too many people and too little plot. The story — or complete lack thereof — shifts equally between the headlining cast — Shaan Shahid, Humayun Saeed, Adnan Siddiqui, Bilal Ashraf and Ahmed Taha Ghani, and ‘their’ women Sana Buccha, Ayesha Omar, Armeena Rana Khan and Uzma Khan.

The rest of the expanded cast — some with very few lines, others functioning as scene decoration — include Aashir Azeem, Umair Jaswal, Ali Rehman Khan, Mansoor Ahmed, Gohar Rasheed, Ayub Khosa, Naeem-ul-Haq, Wali Yousaf and perhaps a dozen or so others that I am forgetting.

Rana, like an endearing father-figure, tries to do justice to the entire roll-call by empowering each with fleeting moments of humanity. He also clumps the characters into groups and divides their scenes sequentially, one after the other. With the gaps in storytelling, one hardly attunes to a single group, before the story jumps to the next. Every character, as a result, appears negligible.

Out of the ensemble, Bilal Ashraf (an alternative to Hamza Ali Abbasi’s cute-army-man-next-door from Waar) is fine, while Ayub Khosa and Gohar Rasheed are impeccable.

Saeed (at times exceptional) plays Torjan, a psychopathic villain who feels ecstasy when raining bullets on people in the middle of a prayer, and is even happier to abduct a helpless bride-to-be (Ayesha Omar). His cause to rebel is as superficial as any terrorist’s and Rana, with foresight, chooses to keep his allegiance ambiguous (Torjan is not Taliban).

The director’s smarts pay off in erratically fitted passages. For instance, Ayesha Omar, who sobs with unceasing fervour in every scene, at one moment shares a tense argument with the villain. Rana, showing a brief spark of brilliance, captures their individual desperation in a continuous long take, taxing the actors and culminating with what could have been Pakistani cinema’s first lip-lock.

Shaan, the apparent lead in a lead-less film (every character has lead material qualities), plays a calm soul whose army lineage makes him the go-to man-of-action. “Is dharti pe mere khoon ka haq ziyada hai … mein shaheed ka beta hoon [This soil has a right to my blood ... I am the son of a martyr],” he affirms in an argument, forcing his commanders to assign him life and death missions. In his pastime, minimal as it is, he appreciates paintings in art galleries by jotting down what he feels when he sees them.

Yalghaar, despite its skin-deep forays into its key character’s private life, does not look like a Rs23.5 crore motion picture (the amount may have been spent, but it does not show). Action sequences, shot with live ammo, feel near-indistinguishable. Most night scenes are under-lit in a bid to make them feel natural, but the footage is at times littered with digital noise (a compromise almost all low-light selfie-snappers know by now).

Rana, like his film, is a work in progress. The only difference: Rana is still maturing and the film is playing this Eid.

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 25th, 2017