CAST:  Kangana Ranaut, Arjun Rampal, Sharib Hashmi, Divya Dutta, Saswat

DIRECTOR: Razneesh Ghai

CAUTION: Skin’n’Swear / Blood and Gore/ Violence against women and Children depicted.

BLUF: Agent Agni, a highly trained and deadly field agent is entrusted with the mission to gather Intel and eliminate Rudraveer, an international human and arms trafficker who has been off the radar for ten years.

IN THE KNOW

Wondering where the story derailed in Dhaakad ?
It never got started.
The movie starts with a Lara Croftish avatar of Kangana shooting a bunch of people in a building in Eastern Europe while her boss ( Saswata Chatterjee) complaints about her lack of respect for protocol.
Through that finger licking good yummy blood shots , Agni – the agent has a traumatic childhood that keeps haunting her sub- conscious as her stunts grow bloodier as if the story needs to create a justification for a gun-toting, trigger happy protagonist, who is happy to swing into gravity defying moves to make her opponents insignificant.

Now we were expecting a lot and came away with a lot of disappointment.

First things first, Arjun Rampal – he had all of 4 scenes and makes his real presence felt after the interval which really was a bummer cuz even as a bad guy – he makes bad look good .

The story building of the movie was long, drawn out and really not required. It made a lullaby out of an action flick and sadly diluted the entire momentum we should’ve seen. The character building of Agni and Rudra were such long drawn out sequences in black and white that they could’ve been documentaries in their own right.

What was Divya Dutta doing in the middle ? Her entire character could’ve been dispensed off and Rudra given more screen.
The editing and continuity of the sequences was so patchy that we literally had to figure out what must’ve happened to cause a certain action sequence to happen to create coherence in story telling.

It was a dampener. Though Kangana was supposed to be the Atomic Blonde meet Lara Croft (she even dresses in boots and  two braids for impact), her finesse at action was questionable- something no amount of VFX could fix .

The mismatch of the sound and sequence on camera on some action sequences was another shotty angle.
The story had no layers , no big reveals and was so predictable that all our bets on who the main baddie would be was a sad game of poker.

Kangana seems to have made a very diligent attempt at improving her voice and her English diction though she does slip up in long dialogues .

The antagonists were also overplayed and almost cartoonish. Agni played 6 different personalities in this movie and 10 different hair styles. Often had a hard time figuring out who was who due to numerous wardrobe changes. A quick warning: brutality towards women and children. Watch with caution.

On the whole, what a waste of time , effort and energy when despite such good actors – and a probable story, beneath all that jazz – you just don’t see the plot materialize because of craptacular execution