After watching Jami's O21, I had high hopes for MOOR because he doesn't follow the usual ingredients of a Lollywood or Bollywood movie. Surely, MOOR wasn't your typical Indian musical or a romcom. The basic story line is powerful, it deals with corruption in railways, neglect of government for Balochistan, moral degradation of society (particularly Karachi), lust of man for money and bonding within the family. What Jami failed to do this time was to create a steady momentum of the story. Movie seems to be a product of bad editing where haphazard scenes collide. The first 50 minutes seemed like a psychological thriller where a man is marred with the guilt of not saving his mother in his childhood. Also those 50 minutes could have been shown in a total of 15 minutes span. Scenes are shot in detail from an artistic point of view not from storytelling perspective. The emotional scenes are so long that they affect the whole feeling in it. The director failed to project the characters emotions. Dialogues seemed to be a rip off of an old moral story that mothers in Pakistan tell their kids and they were prolonged for no particular reason. You have got your railway corruption, backwardness of Balochistan and moral dilemmas being shown at the same time, nothing is wrong with it
but poor editing made it confusing for the audience to concentrate to all of it. The light background music wasn't effective during the dialogues as it should have been. Shots were too much zoomed in. There is hardly a scene where you see a character's full body or the environment he/she is in (apart from the outside shots in Balochistan). It was as if cameraman didn't knew how to zoom out. Maybe the director wanted to show the facial expressions in detail while a character's life is in turmoil but it was all too much. From an artistic directors' point of view, the shots are beautiful. But overall Jami failed to compile the movie to convey a heavy message. You have to assimilate more than 90 minutes to receive this message: Money is not real happiness, family ties are important, Pakistan (motherland) is to be taken care of by every individual and to always act morally.
