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Katrina has gotten particularly atrocious reviews for Fitoor. Will she come out unscathed especially since the audience tastes are becoming more discerning?? Is this the beginning of the end for her cause Fitoor was a safer bet than her next movie Baar Baar Dekho with Sid. She might just have to re-focus her attention on Jagga Jaasoos now cause who knows her pairing with Ranbir under Basu's direction might be able to resurrect her career.
Some selected reviews on her performance in Fitoor -
- Barring Tabu , both Aditya Roy Kapur and Katrina has done gross injustice to their roles. Katrina's dialogues were so fragmented and unconvincing that when she is put in same frame with talented Tabu, one can easily have simultaneous lessons in how to act and how not to.
- Katrina Kaif fails once again to make a mark with her acting skills. She feels like a life-like doll throughout the film. You'd think with over more than a decade in the industry, she would've learnt to act, but alas it was not to be.
- Katrina is good so long as she has to just be herself. So she dances, smiles and flirts cutely but the minute a dramatic scene comes up that patent "moist eyes and dewy lips" act draws attention to her utter inadequacy as a performer.
- Katrina, after years in front of the camera, seems to be more concerned about her looks than acting skills. Her accent continues to be straight out of Harrods'. Even though her character is shown to write a letter in Urdu, the pronunciation jangles your earbuds.
- Firdaus is played by Katrina Kaif, and one can see why, on paper, this might make sense. Estella keeps a tight lid on her emotions, which would seem to suit Kaif's range, which has broadened only slightly in the last 12 years. But Estella, raised by Miss Havisham as her revenge on men, is a difficult part, and Kaif, hard as she might try, isn't the right actor to get to convey complicated emotional states. The problem isn't just the actor's implacable surface but her inability to suggest that something is going on underneath.
- The romantic scenes remain so till the time the focus is on Aditya but you lose interest the moment the camera shifts to Katrina. Not just because her character is least interested in Aditya, but because her dialogues sound fake and Katrina's one-dimensional acting fails to bring across the passion even in the most intimate of scenes.
- Katrina Kaif is heartbreak personified. As Firdaus, she does a good job of capturing exactly what her character has been raised to do: break hearts. Katrina deserves applause for the scenes which require her to be cold-hearted and steely. However, that is, till the time Kaif is faced with the insurmountable task of emoting on screen. Her emotional scenes need to be swallowed with a pinch of salt. For every frame that Tabu tears the viewer's heart apart with, there's a Katrina dampening it somewhat.
- Katrina Kaif's Firdaus is like a beautiful mannequin on display in a store (maybe the same aforementioned mall). Randomly and whimsically, she runs off into snow-capped vistas so that Anay Goswamy's camera can capture the beauty of Kashmir in all its panoramic beauty.There are moments of heart-stopping beauty in the film when Katrina Kaif is captured in the snowy splendor looking into a distant horizon , like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Streep had the virtuosity and an inner strength to build her character's mystique from within herself and project it outwards.Kaif and her director are content to capture her physical beauty. The soul be damned.
- Kaif feels like a prop in Fitoor, but It's not as though Firdaus doesn't have a significant role in the film. She has the all-important task of choosing between two men: a successful Indian artist and a powerful Pakistani politician. If only we cared. If only she cared. Instead, Firdaus glides through Fitoor treating it like an extended Choc-On ad.
- But Fitoor saddles Kaif with more emotionally heavy moments than the actress of limited means can handle. Her equally miscast co-star also struggles to convey his inner turmoil. The scenes between the pair are dead on arrival, and there is no mistaking them for anything but two wooden oars rowing in different directions.
- Katrina Kaif looks stunning and has acted well in a few scenes. But, she messes up when she does an emotional scene. She is pathetic when it comes to crying on screen.
- Katrina Kaif on other hand as usual is below par. She looks stunning in almost all the frames and but can she act? Well she can't.
- Katrina Kaif as Firdaus looks stunning. But when it comes to her act, she does not exactly give us anything great to marvel on or remember. In fact even the director mostly places her in scenes with minimum dialogues.
- The kids are gone. Katrina Kaif is Firdaus, red of hair, fair of skin and blank of expression. Aditya Roy Kapoor is Noor, a sulky, morose character completely lacking in spirit, more squeak than Pip. He gazes at her vacuously, as if waiting to be whispered his lines, while she can't effectively be outraged at his staring because she can't say 'Staring' she manages a ghouurrna.Later in the film she even refers to him as Knorr, like he were instant soup. Ah, if only. Fitoor takes its own sweet time to unravel and the languor is unearned because the longing is unconvincing. Even when these two make love, they do so only for the cameras, putting their most photogenic feet forward. A Tale Of Two Pretties.
- Equally predictable is the worst thing about the movie: Kaif's disastrous, one-note performance. Her stilted Hindi delivery, muddled accent (how does someone who grew up in Kashmir and then studied in London sound... American?), and unimpressive histrionics are a massive blot on this film.When will studios realise that star value needn't and shouldn't come at the cost of the basics? Thank heavens the rest of the cast is consistently better than her, with special mention for the young actor who plays Noor's best friend, Aarif (he even looks a little like a young Alec Guinness, who played the same role in David Lean's 1946 version).
- Katrina Kaif is cast in the movie to play the character of Estella who is curt, indifferent and a tease in Dicken's Great Expectations, but she even fails to swing that curtness that comes naturally to her. The girl who plays the young Firdaus has acted better. Or wait. Even her painting that Noor makes has better expressions.
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