Movie review: 'Omerta' falls short of getting into a terrorist's mind

Omerta stumbles in its quest to attain any kind of balance

For the longest time, Osama bin Laden was repelled by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug-turned-terrorist whose feral, sectarian approach to jihad was one of the main reasons for the formation of the Islamic State. Al-Zarqawi was an uncouth ruffian altogether too unpleasant for the al-Qaeda chief’s liking, who prided himself on being a member of the educated elite. According to some accounts, this antipathy was evident in their very first meeting.

Chances are that bin Laden would have instantly warmed to Omar Saeed Sheikh, the protagonist of Hansal Mehta’s latest work, Omertà. Sheikh, after all, is more bin Laden’s type: polished, educated and stoically gallant. Sheikh himself, on death row and lodged in a Hyderabad (the Pakistan one) jail since 2002, would probably be pleasantly surprised to discover that Mehta found his life “worthy” of an entire film. Even though the film plays him up as a critical mastermind for the al-Qaeda, Sheikh, unlike Ayman al-Zawahari, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Mahfouz Ibn al-Waleed, was never part of bin Laden’s coterie of advisers. He was important yet largely peripheral.

His two most well-known militant “accomplishments”, the kidnapping of foreign backpackers in New Delhi in 1994 and the abduction and killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, form the meat of Omertà. A student at the London School of Economics, Sheikh abandons his education and thinks of jetting off to Bosnia to avenge the plight of Muslims being butchered during the 1990s civil war in erstwhile Yugoslavia. One moment he is contemplating heading to Eastern Europe, the next he has taken up the cause of Kashmir. Most of this passage sees Sheikh praying, his father dissuading him from leaving home for Karachi, him training with fellow militants to the tune of clichéd Arabic music in the background, and him praying some more.

Through flashbacks and spasmodic use of archival news footage, Mehta succeeds in delivering a non-linear storyline that is not the hardest to follow. But the film stumbles in its quest to attain any kind of balance. Some sequences, such as the one where Sheikh befriends and then kidnaps foreign tourists, are laboriously detailed. Others feel too rushed. The Inter-Services Intelligence’s fondness for Sheikh and his rise in the militant hierarchy, for instance, are all too abrupt and shoddily executed. Mehta’s visual style is still appealing in parts: Omertà is largely devoid of the dark, dingy sequences that often encumber such films.

Rajkummar Rao, now a fixture in many of Mehta’s projects, turns in an uneven performance as Sheikh. He masters the cold gaze of a dreaded terrorist superbly but remains too stolid for his own good in the end. The British accent, despite his sincere efforts, is dubious, and Rao seems too uncomfortable to fully grow into it.

Omertà’s finest — and most disquieting — moment arrives in the form of Pearl’s beheading. The knife screeching as Sheikh lays into Pearl is bound to chill your bones. And if that wasn’t enough, Sheikh even holds up Pearl’s severed head, all this with a video camera rolling. The historical authenticity of the segment, however, is dodgy. Some books, such as Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy’s The Exile, have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed delivering the final blow on Pearl.

That, however, is the least of Omertà’s problems. Its biggest letdown comes in the form of Mehta’s failure to get into his lead character’s head. Sheikh’s road to radicalisation is somewhat soft-pedalled, with too much attention being heaped on his execution of various terror plots. At a higher level, Mehta adds little newness to the Sheikh persona. Sheikh’s love for milk and chess is one of the few fresh details that emerge from Omertà. The chess part would have impressed the intellectual in bin Laden, but the moviegoer? Not so much.