Star Cast: Kangana Ranaut, Arjun Rampal, Divya Dutta, Saswata Chatterjee
Director: Razneesh ‘Razy’ Ghai
A slick action film that is also coherent is a hard nut to crack for even Hollywood. Dhaakad then is an achievement, in getting those two things right, in chucking the melodrama for spare blood-letting, in heading for the relatively new location of Bhopal and its surroundings, in getting the mood right by dipping into the coal mines there, and even giving us a glimpse of the life in that city with its mixed communities, which seamlessly live together. It should not be this rare, but it is.
What’s Good: There are a couple of things which you immediately forget about what’s coming next.
What’s Bad: The action throughout happens without any solidly explained purpose, hence getting monotonous
Loo Break: Luckily, for everyone wanting a break there’s a lullaby ‘Soja Re’ which is performed in multiple versions & that’s your cue to put that air-conditioning to some better use
Watch or Not?: This film is a ‘financial leakage’, it takes in way more than what it’ll serve back
Available On: Theatrical Release
Runtime: 131 minutes (feels like walking on the longest road in the world, in the heatwave, without water)
Dhaakad Movie Review: Script Analysis
Razneesh Razy Ghai, Chintan Gandhi & Rinish Ravindra’s story is a classic example of how focusing on a few selective departments of a film is never an option. The only fear while stepping into this one was for it to have “all style no substance” and that’s exactly what has happened. We got the point that action looks good, but that doesn’t mean you’ll keep pushing the same thing down our throat expecting us
The protagonist is hunting with revenge linked to her parents, a child traf*icking group connected to this all, and one senior officer helping the protagonist to fulfil the said mission. Is there anything new that you haven’t heard or seen being done in the films before? But, “waaaah, kya action hai!” Credit where it’s due, Tetsuo Nagata’s cinematography indeed gifts us with a few amazingly shot sequences but alas, they don’t build the intrigue.
Dhaakad Movie Review: Star Performance
Kangana Ranaut physically wins the war but mentally loses the battle, because her character is just bland when she’s not fighting on-screen (pun not intended!). We’ve seen the best of her, we’ve seen the worst but this, my friends, is stepping into the ‘dangerous’ category now.
Arjun Rampal & Divya Dutta put their all in for nothing! All of the things they do could’ve won many accolades if it would’ve been done for the right film. Their psycho-jodi very much had the shades of Harley Quinn & Joker but as with everything else, this will all go in vain. Saswata Chatterjee continues to do good things for abandoned children (Jagga Jasoos & now, this), but this time it’s supremely wasted.
Dhaakad Movie Review: Direction, Music
There’s an old saying in Hollywood, if an actor is doing good, the chance is sooner or later someone will give him/her enough money to make a supremely sh***y film. Razneesh ‘Razy’ Ghai has designed a film that’s the celebration of Kangana as an actress but that happens at the cost of a mourning script.
This was the perfect place for composer Dhruv Ghanekar to showcase his love for indo-western fusion & he does it in the best way he knows. It gets eclipsed at times by some loud action sequences.
