Aaghaaz is the start of Yogesh Ishwar's career, his first attempt at direction and judging by the results, it may well be his last. This is a boring, overlong, over stretched, incredible piece of junk offering little or nothing to its audience.

It's the same ol story and done in the same ol way. My immediate point of reference was Ghulam which dealt with a similar situation…but comparing the two films is like comparing hemlata with lata mangeshkar. What a disaster. The film opens with brother and sister (sunil shetty and sister) arriving to settle with friends in Mumbai. There, in the mohalla, he stands up to the local goonda (Mukesh Tiwari) who tries to rape a girl. Having been shown up in front of all the crowds, the goonda's brother (Sharad Saxena) decides to kidnap Shetty's sister demanding that Shetty arrive there. Shetty does and eventually succeeds in humiliating Saxena as well and reducing him to pulp. So the villians now join hands in bringing about the destruction of Shetty.

Oh so predictable…In between all of this, we have one of our heroines Namrata Shirodkar jiving around in foreign locations, and carrying a torch for our hero Govind (Shetty). But Govind has his thoughts elsewhere…we get a glimpse of this in a song when we see him thinking of Sushmita. Aha, there is still a twist or two left in this limp effort. Are we really very interested?

Having helped the villagers but fallen into the hands of the villianous trap set by the local goondas, we are treated to a flashback and find out that Govind was in love with Sudha (Sushmita) who went off to become a policewoman and while she was away, he wa forced into marrying Suman Raganathan who had committed a most heinous crime…she had become pregnant without being married. Her brother Sharad Kapoor is consistently nasty to Govind believing him to be the cause of his sister's misery. However, having discovered that his sister was pregnant by some one else, he poisons her on Karwa Chauth as she did not deserve to have a husband like Govind and she and her child must die for the evil crime of having had pre-marital sex.

This is a most grotesque scene and just goes to show the kind of revolting perception there is about women and what their role is meant to be in society. But one should not really be surprised at this as this sort of thing does go on in the sub-continent but to glorify it in this way, to show the woman as a vamp and deserving, with her baby, to die an agonising death is film making at its most distasteful. We are now transported back to the present, with Govind, felled by a sword, stabbed by a dagger, shot by a gun, but alive and kicking. He is dragged to his mohalla by the gang of nasties who had set out to destroy him, where he has to witness the rape of his sister. The mohalla watches in silence.

I could really go on and on about this dire piece of film making, especially the climax which the director and script writer must have thought to have been a novel and powerful finale to a hard hitting film on good and bad…they got it so wrong. The climax is so utterly incredible that it forms no impression at all. Sunil Shetty is the protagonist of the film but this is a very oft repeated role in an oft repeated tale. He brings nothing new to it. Sushmita Sen only comes in after intermission except for a glimpse in a song earlier on. She does not have much of a role but you can certainly see that she is an actress who, given the right roles, could make a big impression. Namrata Shirodkar is annoying. Music is poor. Direction is sloppy and frankly a mess. Give this one a miss for sure.