CAST: Akshay Kumar, Rakul Preet Singh, Chandrachur Singh, Sujith Shanker, Renaye Tejani, Sargun Mehta, Hrishitaa Bhatt 

DIRECTOR: Ranjit M Tewari

Streams on Hotstar on Hulu

A frame by frame remake of a Tamil Classic, Ratsasan, Cuttputtli, in its 2hr 14 mins of runtime seems to be a lame frame by frame copy of the original. It looks lacklustre in its approach to recreate the thrill of the original. In its attempt to stick to another format, it comes off as a patch work job.

Let us start with Akshay Kumar who plays a 30 ish guy starting his career as a Sub-Inspector after failing to get his murder thriller script being picked up by financiers.

Now, Akshay Kumar, even when fit and fabulous at 50+ looks nowhere near Rakul Preet Singh’s age. We are not being ageist but the attempt to pull of that chemistry was very hard for us to swallow.

We remember Chandrachur Singh for his brilliant debut with Gulzar and his career trajectory that was seemingly spectacular. We also remember him recently being paired opposite the dynamic Sushmita Sen in her web series Aarya. Here somehow he just does not fit.

Even the scenes in which he is supposed to be in the shock of seeing a butchered corpse of his daughter – we half expected he was the killer given that his expressions were so banal and badly enacted.

It seemed that most of the actors in the movie were ill at ease or not comfortable with their roles. Same with Rakul Preet and Sargun Mehta ( they look really alike). With character roles for both of them, one as a teacher who helps the cops in identifying the killer and the other as a Station Head Officer, the boss of all the cops, they had nothing much to do in the movie.

There is even a song slid in which seems so out of place and ill-sequenced that you cannot even enjoy whatever it is. The song unfortunately triggers absurdity in the plot as little girls are falling dead like flies and the cops on the case and dancing and singing.

The film is unable to hold a mature streaming audience captive also because the story being told and its mystery being revealed is so predictive that there is no surprise factor left to hook them.

The reactions of parents shown when their daughters turn up gouged and slaughtered in plastic bags is like they just saw a movie and walked out wiping their tears. Some serious acting lacunae.

Kasauli looks awesome and the story moves frames quickly as the serial killer who picks teenage school girls and leaves doll heads as souvenirs unveils itself as one murder after another leaving a trail of dead girls for the clueless police team in the town.

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The original film gave enough time to establish the evil of the negative lead, which is missing in the Hindi remake giving the villain very little screen time. This makes you question the motive, the back story or even the credible reason as to why the villain killed girls in the first place.

Akshay Kumar has always donned the cop avatar well. Acting wise, this may be one of the better movies he has done but the patchiness of the script and the loopy screenplay really lets him down.

Time for him to do more mature roles and stop romancing women one third his age.

If there were a movie that seemed long and drawn yet rushed the important aspects of the plot – it is here. This one.

We didn’t particularly like it but we have given you the good and the bad so you can decide whether you want to invest more than two hours of your time on this.