Wings of Hope is a drama about Ravi Khanna (Ismail Bashey), a 25 year old who lives in the US along with his father and sister.  Ravi aspires to be a filmmaker, but after his mother died, he has taken to drinking and excessive smoking.  He is in love with Kaajal, who respects him inspite of his habits, but wants him to stop.  One night, Ravi makes the mistake of visiting a drug house with some friends - and is caught.  This brings about a serious change in both his and Kaajal's lives, and several difficult situations that they have to go through.

When I saw trailers for this movie on STAR Movies, I knew it was going to be a melodrama, and I have to say I got what I expected!  This movie is a drama from the first frame to almost the last - there is much sadness and despair experienced by the characters.

The acting is all good, everyone played their roles well (Suresh Oberoi as Kaajal's father seemed to be slowing down his angry lines on purpose though).  The movie was slow though.  At a two hour length, it seemed to me to be dragging on several occasions.  And to add to that, there were several clichéd situations, which made the movie predictable.  Of course, these criticisms may not really be worth taking note of in a movie like this - I think in a drama, twists and turns in the plot aren't all that important.  However, even taking the characters by themselves, I didn't get to know them enough to actually care for/like them.  I felt somewhat disinterested when the focus shifted away from Ravi (probably because after reading the introduction, I thought he was the main protagonist).

On the technical side, the movie's picture quality wasn't very good, the whole thing seemed to be shot in dim lighting conditions - there were places where I couldn't make out characters faces properly!  Maybe the darkish colours were meant to give this a "dramatic" feel.  At certain places, you can also make out a microphone (or shadow of one) tipping into the frame from the top!  The sound quality also was poor, dialogues seemed muffled at times.  (And if anyone says that a low budget could probably be blamed for all this, then I can say that Hyderabad Blues looked better).

This kind of dramatic movie where you see characters losing control over their lives, getting into depressing situations (only to thankfully, recover at the end) is not really my kind of genre.  Even then, I think a well made movie of the same genre would have made an impact on me!  But Wings of Hope didn't do it, because of it's length and the fact that I didn't develop that much of a liking for the characters.  Anyway I still do appreciate it for showing how irresponsibility can ruin one's life - and for also showing that one shouldn't lose hope.

Running Time: 120 minutes | Country: India | Genre: Drama