Movie Review: Mission Istaanbul

Banner: Popcorn Motion Pictures, Balaji Telefilms Ltd
Producer: Ekta Kapoor, Shobha Kapoor, Sunil Shetty, Shabbir Boxwala
Director: Apoorva Lakhia
Star Cast: Zayed Khan, Vivek Oberoi, Shabbir Ahluwalia, Shreya Saran, Sunil Shetty, Nikitin Dheer
Music Director: Shamir Tandon, Chirantan Bhatt, Anu Malik, Mika Singh
Cinematography: Gururaj R J
Choreography: Bosco Martis, Caesar Gonsalves, Remo
Action: Javed, George Aguilar (USA), Ejaz Gulab
Editor: Rajesh Singh
Screenplay: Suresh Nair
Sound: Baylon Fonseca
Costume: Falguni Thakore
Media Relations: Vijay Grover, Firoza Kapadia
Publicity Designs: Epigram
Story Writer: Suresh Nair

The film “Mission Istanbul” is basically a masala action movie with an imaginary script that lacks consistency and emotion. The script has everything about terrorism cruel killing of innocent people, kidnapping tourists, cheating by RAW agents, new agency linked to militants, Afghanistan, Turkey, U.S. President, hidden agendas but the depiction makes its unreal and the film couldn’t be impressive.

The music of the film is average though noticeable but untimely comes out the item number of ‘Abhishek Bachchan from no-where. The performance, look and make up of Vivek and Zayed is impressive and Istanbul shoot locations are gorgeous. The audience who can not tolerate violence, fighting and chasing scenes should keep away from the movie.

The film starts with the Daniel Pearl kind of beheading scene as it shows an Indian doctor is getting beheaded. The Indian news channel Aaj Tak has two reporters giving the news about the cruel incident, Vikas Sagar and Anjali, who are journalists with Aaj Tak and married.

Vikas gets an offer to be a journalist with Al Johara channel, the militants’ news channel and after getting into a rift with wife, Vikas agrees to go to Istanbul to join Al- Johara but to his surprise he finds that previous journalists with the news Agency got killed when they tried to escape from the agency. Vikas meets colleague Owais Hussain and Gazni, who is the owners of the news agency.

Vikas’s first job is to go to Afghanistan with Owais and interview Khalil who has kidnapped foreign tourists and there in Afghanistan, Hussain gets shot .On his funeral
Vikas meets another man named Rizwan Khan who is a Turkish commander and he joins Vikas to help him out of the place.

During the process to get out of the militants news agency where Vikas joined for three months ,Vikas faces many life threatening situation and in the process the film shows many chasing and action scenes.

The director took many ingredients at a time and the basic plot got confused. The cinematography is average and actions are many and mediocre type. The performance of top lead heroes is brilliant but the actress Shriya Saran is average. Sunil Shetty is ok.

The film will be watched by those who like to watch action movies though the actions cannot be compared to some of the known Hollywood movie actions. The general love story and comedy, seekers won’t like to watch the movie.

Rating: 4/10