Supernatural disaster

Daniyal Zahid feels Sunny Leone and Arbaaz Khan make for the most shambolic pair possible in Bollywood

Supernatural disaster
Arbaaz Khan’s role in Tera Intezaar, at least its latter half, is similar to the one he had in 1996 debut Daraar, if you swap the negative and positive shades. And it is this exact juxtaposition that tells you just how much he has fallen as an actor in the past 21 years.

While Daraar’s Vikram gave him the ‘Best Actor in a Negative Role’ Filmfare Award in his very first movie, Tera Intezaar should get him a lifetime achievement award, just to make sure that it turns out to be his very last movie!

With the Arbaaz Khan of Daraar and Pyar Kiya to Darna Kya long buried, and any remnants of there ever being an actor last emerging in the Dabangg series, it is truly time for Arbaaz Khan to call it a day – especially as a lead actor, which he never was two decades ago, and most definitely isn’t in 2017.



Tera Intezaar is, by a very long margin, the worst Indian movie to be screened in Pakistan this year. It sells itself as a ‘supernatural musical romantic film’ on Wikipedia – perhaps to cover enough categories to muster something bordering on relevance to the art of filmmaking – but in actuality is a supernatural disaster.

If you could pick out the worst possible pairings in all of Bollywood, Arbaaz Khan and Sunny Leone would rank right up there. But this is before you actually see them on screen together. They make your worst possible imagination look like Mughal-e-Azam.

Tera Intezaar does have a story but that was always going to be largely irrelevant.

There is an art gallery owner (Sunny Leone), who falls in love with painter (Arbaaz Khan), who had actually painter her before even setting eyes on her. How? Because she is his dream girl, of course – and that is precisely what he tells her.
If there's one thing that Sunny Leone should learn from the film, it is that maybe, just maybe, she should be more selective when it comes to signing scripts - if she ever does read them, of course!

That of course is more than sufficient for the two to fall in love, before you can utter any of the three letters: WTF or indeed OMG, depending on your preferred reaction, which in any case would not be remotely approving.

Then come the art dealers (including Aarya Babbar, Salil Ankola and Sudha Chandran) who want to usurp the rather personal paintings that Veer Singh Rajput (Arbaz Khan) has made of Rounak (Sunny Leone) which Veer doesn’t want to be commercialised.

The art dealers manage to cunningly plot the ‘priceless art’s’ theft, eventually resulting in Veer’s disappearance along with the paintings – which is where the film actually begins from.

In a nutshell, the storyline is about Rounak’s quest to find Veer, who had promised to never ever leave her in any living, dead or supernatural capacity. Also, in a nutshell, if it isn’t evident enough already: everything that ensues is a catastrophe.



With Sunny Leone in the lead, coupled of course with Arbaaz, acting was never going to be a factor in the movie. However, what many of us might’ve been intrigued by is the prospect of an erotic thriller that evidently had supernatural elements.

The only thing really exciting about the movie is the end, which is preceded by a twist-ending, and comes two hours too late. But yes, the filmmakers actually think that they have the audience sufficiently engrossed to give them a shock at the end. For, a film that was a shock from the first to the last second, pulling that off would’ve been Oscar worthy, if anything ever was.

While Tera Intezaar should be the curtain call for Arbaaz Khan’s acting career, the same definitely isn’t true for Sunny Leone. But if there’s one thing that Sunny should learn from the film, it is that maybe just maybe she should be more selective when it comes to signing scripts – if she ever does read them, of course.