Taarzan: The Wonder Car
- Director
- Abbas Mustan
- Studio
- Baba Films
- Release Date
- 6 August 2004
- Language
- Hindi
- Budget
- ₹14.00 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹6.20 Cr
Review
Arjun Nair's Review of "Taarzan: The Wonder Car"
What could have been an intriguing blend of revenge thriller and supernatural drama instead collapses into a confused, tonally incoherent mess. The premise—a wronged engineer's ghost possessing a car to exact vengeance—has genuine potential, but director fails to capitalize on it, oscillating wildly between family sentiment, comedic bullying sequences, and murder mystery without committing to any of them convincingly. Ajay Devgn sleepwalks through the lead role as if he's simultaneously bored and contractually obligated, while the supporting cast seems perpetually confused about what film they're actually in. The technical execution is sloppy; the CGI work on the car is passable at best, and the action sequences feel rushed and poorly choreographed, lacking the punch needed to sell either the supernatural or thriller elements.
The real crime here—and yes, the irony is not lost—is the squandered potential of the central concept. A car as an avenging spirit could be darkly comic or genuinely terrifying; instead, it's merely tedious. The script lurches between half-baked emotional beats about Raj's father and cartoonish villain-dispatching sequences that generate neither genuine thrills nor laughs. Karuna Kapoor's presence adds nothing, and the film's inability to establish consistent internal logic means you spend more time confused about the rules of possession than invested in the outcome. By the final act, you're not rooting
Storyline
Deven Chaudhary's a brilliant automobile engineer who creates an incredible futuristic car design called DC, but when he pitches it to the corporate sharks at FourFox, they straight-up steal his invention and take all the credit! Before he can fight back, the corrupt cops on their payroll beat him down, stuff him in his beloved old Morris Minor—nicknamed Taarzan—and push the car into a lake with him inside, leaving his family devastated and clueless about his disappearance. It's brutal, it's unfair, and it sets up everything that comes next.
Twelve years later, Deven's now-grown son Raj discovers Taarzan rusting in a scrapyard and buys it with money he's saved working as a mechanic, determined to restore it as a tribute to his mysteriously missing father! He and his boss Kartar Singh rebuild the car into something even more advanced than the original design and rename it DC in Deven's honor, but it won't start no matter what they try—until one magical night when Deven's vengeful spirit literally possesses the car and fires it up, and suddenly this vehicle becomes something supernatural and unstoppable! The car starts driving itself on midnight joyrides, teaching Raj's bullies a lesson they won't forget, but then things get darker when Deven uses his spectral control to hunt down and eliminate the executives and corrupt cop who murdered him years ago.
Now Raj's caught in a nightmare situation where his beloved car is the prime suspect in a string of mysterious murders, and the investigating inspector is closing in on him despite his complete innocence! Raj has to figure out what's really happening while dealing with the weight of his father's vengeance coming back to haunt him, and ultimately he realizes that Deven's thirst for revenge—while justified—is destroying everything and everyone around him, including his own son's future. It's a stunning collision of justice, love, and the supernatural that forces both father and son to confront what really matters in the end!
