I held my breath wondering what he will show her. Relax. It's just the tattoos which make our hero so loftily heroic. Just to drive in the hero's anointed status we have the noisy background score where star-stuck choruses chant in unison about Shiva the Destroyer, blah blah. Shivaay is so steeped in self importance so awed by its own intended grandeur it seems to forget there is a story to tell. Story, there is to tell. But the plot is propelled forward in stuttering staccato waves of melodrama and action.

The key word for Shivaay is ambition. This film tries to push the envelope in terms of stylized and high quality action. Under Ajay Devgn's directorial vision, the movie even succeeds to emulate the kind of action set pieces that you'd expect from a Hollywood movie. But the film takes too much time to conclude its business. The generous 3 hour runtime and some very poor choice of dialogue, stifle the proverbial punch of the film. If you enjoy action, this film will provide a very satisfactory experience. You just need to take the iffy screenplay with a pinch of salt.

Shivaay (Ajay Devgn), a fearless Himalayan mountaineer covered in Lord Shiva tattoos, heads to Bulgaria to fulfill his nine-year-old daughter Gaura's (Abigail Eames) wish of seeing her mother Olga (Erika Kaar), who abandoned them years ago. But their plan goes for a toss when the little girl gets kidnapped in the foreign land. Rescuing her from the masked child-traffickers becomes his only reason for survival.

It's not every day that you get to witness the clash of two gigantic films at the Box-Office. There have been times when two big films that got released on the same day and in some cases like LAGAAN and GADAR EK PREM KATHA (June 15, 2001), DIL and GHAYAL (June 22, 1990), both the releases managed to succeed at the box office. Despite releasing on the same date, these films proved to be blockbusters at the Box-Office. This week sees the release of two gigantic films in the form of SHIVAAY and AE DIL HAI MUSHKIL.

Way back in 2008, Liam Neeson had reinvented himself as an action hero with Taken, in which he played a former CIA agent on the rampage after his daughter gets kidnapped by a gang of traffickers. Ajay Devgn took more or less the same one-liner, added some desi tadka to it and came up with Shivaay, a film which was also directed by him. However, while Taken was a kick-ass thriller, Shivaay comes across as a self-indulgent affair.

Girish Karnad is in Shivaay. The venerable actor, a luminary of the stage and screen, here plays a wheelchair-bound father asking his daughter to invite a young girl in from the cold. The daughter, fresh off an encounter with the titular chap, Shivaay, is too thunderstruck to really hear him, and so the crippled father, determinedly starts hoisting himself out of the wheelchair, only to fall back into it, drained. The shocked daughter asks why he did this, to which Karnad says -- in the voice of a fine actor ambushed by a paycheque -- that someone has to stand up.

Shivaay ( Ajay Devgn) is a mountaineer who conducts treks in the Himalayas. On one of his tours, he meets Olga (Erika Kaar) who hails from Bulgaria. After he saves her life in a deadly avalanche, the duo fall in love. Olga becomes pregnant and is not willing to give birth to a child but on Shivaay's insistence, she agrees to deliver the child but refuses to raise it with him and leaves to Bulgaria.

First things first. If you are an Ajay Devgn fan, shut this tab right now and go watch Shivaay. If not, maybe have a look at this in case you want some sort of sanity intact. And if you're determined to watch Shivaay any way whatsoever, a sensible thing to do would be to carry the chillum along, a la Shiva. Take a few puffs and you're all set. Without the puffs, it is impossible to survive Shivaay.

In the closing shot of Shivaay, debutant actress Sayyeshaa Saigal says, "I don't know what to say. I am at a loss for words." We too somewhat felt the same after watching this marathon self-indulgent and over lengthy movie that ran for a mind boggling 172 minutes. The Ajay Devgn movie drags on and on, making it a literal snooze fest after a certain point. And that is perhaps Shivaay's biggest shortcoming.

Random indeed are the ways of Shivaay, both the film and the character. The hero knows no limits. He leaps off snow-capped cliffs and slithers down steep mountains with the ease of a boy swatting flies. Likewise the film. It stops at nothing. One brief exchange sums up Shivaay perfectly. The Bulgarian heroine asks the titular protagonist: "Shivaay with a y. Why." Exactly our question. The hero's reply is curt and casual: "Why not?" True. Shivaay dangles between many such whys and why nots.

Who would have dreamt that such an overtly sexual conversation derived from the mythology of Lord Shiva would emerge from staid, conservative Ajay Devgn and the rarely adventurous Hindi film industry. Yet, that is what you get in Shivaay, Devgn's second directorial venture, which is the story of a modern-day Indian resident of the upper reaches of the Himalayas, mountaineer, guide to foreign tourists and chillum-smoking fount of indomitable strength.

Some college students join Shivaay (Ajay Devgn) for a mountaineering mission. Olga (Erika Kaar), a Bulgarian studying at the Delhi University, is one of them. There is a spontaneous spark between Olga and Shivaay. They fall in love before the sun sets. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to hold Olga back in India. But, our heroes know how to preserve love for centuries. And thus after years, Shivaay decides to visit Bulgaria. Gaura (Abigail Eames), an eight-year-old girl, is accompanying him. Olga hadn't left only Shivaay wandering in the mountains.