No Hindi movie in recent memory had a screenplay and visuals like that of Aamir, a movie with débutant director Raj Kumar Gupta and débutant lead actor Rajeev Khandelval, along with the débutant music composer and cinematographer.Also, for the first ever time the dingy by lanes in the dirtiest parts of the dreamy film city Bombay (Mumbai) have been captured on the big screen. If Bluffmaster captured Mumbai in all its splendour, Aamir catches the city off guard, showing things no one ever dared to think about, let alone show.Imagery is central to the entire idea of the movie Aamir. Once when the protagonist bumps into a pole right in the middle of the narrow lane in which he was chasing his bag snatchers, the poster towards the left announces "a gift for you". Similarly there is a TV visual in Aamir's room in the lodge which is showing a familiar discovery/animal planet video of a leopard chasing its prey, and the one where the mafia don is casually playing with a monkey faced puppet while talking on phone, prodding and knocking the toy whenever it gets stuck. Another interesting theme is the portrait shots of quaint characters on the street and in the surroundings. Normally such visuals are reserved for the climax or some central (normally disturbing) incident in a movie. Over here, the entire film is peppered with such portraiture. Amidst all these settings and scenarios is the taut, tough story that grips you almost from the word go and never lets it hold slacken even once. People may ask, why catch a stranger, why not some expert hand? Well I guess that strangers entail lesser risks of getting caught. Even if Aamir would have been captured, it would have been him only who faced the music. By the time the authorities figure out, the mafia don would be conveniently out of the country, having eliminated as much evidence as possible. An interesting thing is that barring Aamir and his family, barely anyone else has a name. Everyone is unknown; the area alien, the voices threatening and the looks menacing. Rajeev Khandelval surely impresses in his maiden effort (I don't watch TV serials so haven't seen him there). However, his role, due to the tautness of the screenplay, is unidimensional. It will take him a few more movies to fully figure out his potential and/or limitations.

1st watched 1/30/2010 – 4 out of 10 (Dir-Raj Kumar Gupta): Fair thriller with good soundtrack but typical American-like terrorist theme played out very much like a lot of Hollywood output in this genre. They story is basically about a seemingly innocent Indian native who is returning to his homeland from England to continue his practices locally because of more stringent requirements on foreigners(as far as I could understand). He is thrown a cell phone by some motorbike riders and given instructions to follow or his family will be harmed. Of course, he wants to know who's behind this and what it's all about but the abductors won't give him the info right away. He eventually finds out they're a part of a Muslim extremist group that wants to start a holy war(and it's followers appear to be everywhere and know everything about him) and they choose him for some reason to help them. The movie follows the typical good-guy manipulated by bad-guy motif and then tries to end with making us think about our moral choices. I won't give away the ending but basically he has to decide if his life is more important than strangers' lives in an excruciatingly long final scene. The soundtrack was the best part of this movie and otherwise it was a typical Hollywood-like thriller that Bollywood shouldn't be trying to imitate – in my opinion.

Much have been talked about the movie already, but very little about the music. Amit Trivedi has not only composed some of the finest music from Bolly-stable, but even the background score of the movie is so good and adds to the cumulative journey a viewer is taken thru the movie. The frustration, helplessness, anger, are so well spoken through the music, very few movies from Bollywood have been able to attain this level of connection between screenplay and background score. Few songs will remain with me for the longest time. Haara, Ek Lau ... there are other tracks I heard on the album, but didn't hear on the movie like 'Phas gaya'. All these are tracks par excellence.

Aamir is a nice film and can be seen although the subject is inspired of 2005 released Cavite . The title is played by Rajeev Khandelwal, and watching him on small screen i always doubted him but his performance did astonished me. And I was glad this guy could really act too. He was perfect with the emotions part, since he didn't had more dialogs he expressions for portraying the emotions were really good. But what lacked is his voice, I believe if he has a bit heavy voice he can surely do wonders. Coz when you see him in the film in scenes where he's suppose to be agitated and angry and whenever he shouts, the expression were OK but his voice is so low pitched that it just didn't faired the moment completely. Nevertheless, when I expected nothing from him. He certainly gave me a pleasant surprise.