After years of giving rotten-tomato reviews to Bollywood, its now Khalid Mohammed's turn to face the music. Khalid did the screenplay for Shyam Benegal's 'Mammo' and 'Zubeida'. He then decided to venture into direction with his story 'Fiza', where he seems to have been caught between the demands of commercialism and realism and chosen to tread the middle path, denying the movie a credible platform.
Fiza (Karisma Kapoor) and Aman (Hrithik Roshan) live with their widowed mother (Jaya Bachchan). The Mumbai riots break out and Aman innocently joins in. Lots of bloodshed later, Aman doesn't return home fearing arrest. Six years later, a distressed Fiza leaves home in search of her brother. She survives the media hype and politicians waiting to get mileage by helping her. By some strange stroke of luck, she finds her brother, now a terrorist. She brings him back home to reform him, in vain. He goes back to his old ways. With Karisma and Hrithik too involved in their star status to give convincing performances, the only saving grace of the film is Jaya Bachchan.
Others in the cast included model Bikram Saluja, Neha, Sushmita Sen in a dance number, and Manoj Bajpai in a well enacted cameo. Khaled had a good team behind the camera (Santhosh Sivan, Farha Khan, Ganesh Hegde, Pradeep Guha) but he fails to get his message through. Khalid the critic that he is should have known better
