Vipul Shah's follow up to Aankhen is yet another Gujarati play that Shah has remade for the hindi screen..but whereas Aankhen was exciting and inventive, if a little over the top, Waqt is a ridiculous father-son drama so utterly pathetic that you wonder what Amitabh and Akshay ever saw in the script in the first place.

Ishwar (Amitabh Bachchan) has a toy factory and we open with a host of children bouncing up and down in a playground as Ishwar celebrates someone's birthday…You imagine that you are in the past but in fact you are not..confused, one cuts to son Adi (Akshay kumar) who is romancing Pooja (Priyanka) somewhere in some bizarre desert and three songs later, the couple land up at his parents home having tied the knot. She comes from a home where there is an indoor swimming pool (which looks more like a fish pond) and a home which has seven bedrooms whereas his house only has four….! It's all so utterly silly and unbelieavable. Father and son play silly games, and mother (Shefali Chhaya) looks disapprovingly as her son is complete wastrel…. He has no job and blows up his father's money at the drop of a hat. Adi has aspirations of making it as a filmstar but somehow, this never seems to come to fruition as Adi flits from one song to another with nothing in between. Father indulges him but father and mother share a deep dark secret, which to the regular hindi filmgoer, will come as no surprise. Before Waqt runs out, Pops wants to set his son straight. So from being sweet old Dad, he turns into an ogre, flinging son and daughter in law out of the house, so they can inhabit a shack at the end of their lawn, hopefully forcing Adi to take a job. Well, Adi takes up a jharoo and brings tears of joy to his relieved wife. Pops however is not impressed and continues to wage a campaign of attrition, which seems difficult to fathom and is simply an assault on the senses. You wonder what good its going to do. The rationale being that poor sonny will be driven to desperation and in hating his father, will make something of himself. Pops however does manage to drop into the film sets to see his son being roasted alive as a stuntman…but obviously feels this is character-building. After a good 20 dogs set out to maul our poor lost boy in the meadow, Adi returns with provisions for the pregnant wife and to bright “light” to his home.

Waqt is simply awful. One wonders what the play involved but Vipul Shah has obviously opened the play out with many more characters and his lack of direction, his complete loss at how to pad the play out is best seen in the first 450 minutes when three boring songs are thrust down your throat and in the true sense of the word, waqt becomes nightmare..because you still have at least another 2 hours to go before this limping wreck of a vehicle will totter to an end. If there is even one person who doesn't guess the secret within moments of hubby and wife discussing the awfulness of the secret, then you have no right being in the cinema. If only it had been Norman in the attic which was the secret…!

Amitabh is pedestrian…in fact, it's a film like this that angers one. Why does he indulge in rubbish like this. Akshay fares no better. A film that centres around the two main protagonists is stolen in what little way by the highly accomplished Shefali Chhaya. She really should not have wasted her efforts but is a mile ahead of anyone else in the cast. Priyanka Chopra is fine….all pasty faced and bleary eyed. A few laughs initially via Boman Irani and Rajpal Yadav leads way to utter tedium as the joke is stretched out too long. Anu Malik's music is dire..even a brief appearance by Anu in a song cannot save the film from sinking. Waqt-a race against time would be better known as Waqt-a waste of time.