Movie Review - Kaabil by Suhel Johar

Kaabil Is A Predictable Revenge Drama

 The announcement of Kaabil was a real surprise and totally out of the blue. Hrithik Roshan and director Sanjay Gupta both have different cinematic sensibilities so the idea of their coming together for a film occurred as farfetched. Their collaborative work Kaabil, a vendetta based action drama that is produced by Hrithik Roshan’s father, actor/director Rakesh Roshan is now out in the open.

A revenge drama with the twist being the fact that the main protagonists in the movie are both blind in Sanjay Gupta’s Kaabil, based partially on South Korea’s Broken and Netflix’s Daredevil. The film opens with Rohan Bhatnagar (Hrithik Roshan) preparing breakfast. Instantly we know that he’s a magical man.

Though Rohan can’t see, he can fix a kid’s bicycle, ride a bicycle, can sniff people apart, and believes that nothing is impossible if you have the confidence. Even more unbelievable is the fact that Rohan works as a dubbing artist and is often found in studios making funny voices for cartoon characters.

Apart from being so awesome, he’s also very handsome and adorable. So, obviously, one Mrs Mukherjee wants to set him up with Supriya (Yami Gautam).

She herself is pretty awesome. Supriya works for a NGO, is independent and not so excited about the prospect of marrying a blind man because, she believes that two negatives don’t make one positive. But, luckily for Rohan, Su, as he starts calling her at their very first meeting discovers that Su is also a piano teacher at a dance school.

Su and Ro have a dance floor routine, with pretended blindness is all very stagey but fun because the two, make a delightful, handsome couple.

The best scene in the film is the scene in which Su and Ro get separated in a mall. There is a lot of chaos due to a film unit who have come there to promote their film. For a few minutes Su gets lost in the mall and the sequence seems really scary, poignant and very emotional.

The scene gets the two even more closer and in the meantime Su also realises that Ro is not an ordinary man but a super human being. They soon tie knot.

But things turn bad when Wasim ( the son of a butcher) and his friend Amit (Rohit Roy), the younger, spoilt brother of a corporator Madhavrao Shelar (Ronit Roy) cast their evil eyes on Rohan and Supriya’s love story. From this point onwards, Kaabil becomes a revenge drama, one man’s fight to dish out his own justice to those who did wrong to his loved one.

This isn’t so much a story of revenge, as it is one of punishment. Both of the guilty and himself, rather than revenge in the traditional sense.

There is nothing exploitative or enjoyable in this film, as it’s the drama which anchors everything down. After Rohan kills his wife’s first attacker, the rest of the film follows him tracking down the next culprit. The corrupt cops together enlists the audience as members of Team Rohan. The audience wants what he wants. Anger is an emotion that Gupta magnificently passes over to the audience to experience in tandem with his main protoganist.

Thanks to its implausible script the film feels too good to be true after a certain point. Sanjay Gupta tries and tells his story well. There are several hitches that the viewer needs to deal with in this ride that he or she embarks on, much like Gupta's protagonist. Kaabil is extremely stretched, several scenes are forced, several others out of place. Not a single song deserves to be in the film and seem forced and hamper the story telling. Sameer Arya's cinematography is wonderful.

If Kaabil works, it is because of its lead actor, Hrithik Roshan, who has a static blank look throughout the film to make himself look convincing as a blind man. His good looks and his larger than life personality is what make the audience feel he can do anything despite being visually impaired. He overdoes some bits, but does manage to hold the attention of the audience. He is blind but he doesn't need your sympathy but support and belief in him. He knows how to manage his way around, although several soapy dialogues take the edge away from Rohan. Barring Hrithik’s character and to some extent that of Rohit Roy most of the characters in the film are uni dimensional. Hrithik and Yami look good together on screen and share a sweet chemistry. Yami Gautam does not have much to do and is mostly passable.

The villains in the film, Rohit and Ronit Roy, have been made to ham their way through Kaabil to enhance the character of Hrithik. The trick works and makes it easier for the audience to empathise with Hrithik. The audience clap and whistle when the Roy brothers are beaten around and eventually killed by Hrithik.

Girish Kulkarni and Narendra Jha as corrupt cops do as required. Suresh Menon as Rohan’s friend makes his presence felt.

Kaabil has a lazy first half and we wished the pace picked up early on. Slow moving and deliberately paced, the film does require patience, with its violent, claustrophobically staged killing scenes being tense and tough to watch, and never used merely to inject a little pace or excitement. There are moments where the film struggles for a satisfactory climax and relies a bit on convenience and melodrama to push things forward. The cat-and-mouse plot fizzles out long before its lacklustre finale.

On the whole, Kaabil lacks the spark to woo in the audience.