Little Zizou - Review

Interesting promos, curiosity value, a seemingly fun movie one might think.
Well, not quite.
No Storyline, no direction, boredom.
Well, that's more like it.

When ones goes into this film , they would generally expect a mad tale woven around a fun Parsi community, some light-hearted humour & two hours well spent, but alas, that is not the case.

This is the movie narrated by a young boy Xerxes (Jahan Bativala), about his family & neighbors. His family comprises of his crazy father Cyrus II (Sohrab Ardeshir) & his reticent brother Artaxerxes (Imad Shah). Cyrus II is a self-proclaimed healer running a Parsi movement & doesn't care much for his kids or anyone else.
Artaxerxes is an artist in himself & has the dream of creating a simulator out of a junk cockpit along with two of his friends.

The other family in play is Boman Presswala (Boman Irani) who runs a newspaper serving the Parsi community, his wife Roxanne (Zenobia Shroff) & two daughters. They are a happy fun family & dont get along with Cyrus II & his ideologies.

The story in this movie, if any, is about how few people turn intolerant towards others, as they don't want the Zoroastrian community mixing with any other & how they slowly realise their mistake & a turnaround of sorts takes place.

The narrative is extremely sluggish, at times making you wonder what is happening on screen. The track moves back & forth from Cyrus II and his assistant Miss Patel (Shernaz Patel) who is in awe of him, to Xerxes not having a mother to care for him, spending time with Roxanne in whom he sees a mother figure.
One thing which is loud & clear here is that this movie is NOT a comedy. Unlike all the misleading promos, this movie has only a handful of laughs, courtesy some of the typical Parsi Gujarati language & one begins to wonder if this is yet another case like the movie Mithya, which was projected to be something it wasn't.

Another mystery one fails to understand is the title Little Zizou. Though they show that Xerxes is a big fan of Zinedine Zidane, hence calling himself Little Zizou, it in no way has any implication in the films context, thus the name failing to register a logical meaning.

Of all the performances, only a few are worth a notable mention. Boman Irani as the fun, family man Presswala is brilliant. He is funny in the light-hearted moments & does great even in the emotional ones. He plays the role straight from the heart.
Imad Shah as the wandering dreamer is also good. He underplays the character but does justice to it.
Finally Jahan Bativala as Xerxes does a good job as well, but unfortunately the script does not support these actors.
A string of cameos from various actors like John Abraham (wasted cameo), Cyrus Broacha (tries to hard), Kunal Vijaykar or Kamal Siddhu doesn't salvage any hope for this film.

The direction of veteran writer Sooni Taraporevala deserves hardly any mention. She fails to hold the audiences attention.

All in all, this movie looks interesting in the promos, but is unfortunately limited to that. Give it a skip, save some time, save some money.

Critical - 1.5/5
Commercial - 1/5