Neeyat
Rating: * ½
Neeyat is not quite the Knives Out whodunit you expect it to be. It is a miracle how bland and listless the entire proceeding is, considering it borrows some wicked chapters from notorious billionaire Vijay Mallya’s dirty book of national plunder.
And indeed, Ram Kapoor makes a delightful Mallya, hearty party laughter and all. When he is murdered(sigh, spoiler behind) at his own happy-burday gathering at his Scottish castle(no less, though towards the end the ambitious project seems to have run out of funds, green screen Scotland and all), Vidya Balan shows up looking more like Barbra Streisand than Daniel Craig(the Knives Out detective).
I almost expected Vidya as CBI agent Mira Rao to burst into a song(a la Streisand). But she is a no-nonsense detective in a plot that is nothing but nonsense. With her Sadhna fringe and Streisand pout Balan makes a good sleuth, alas,in search of good plot.
Not this one, sorry. This whodunit has more plot-holes than one can count on one’s fingers and toes.For a crime thriller the writing is shockingly off-kilter , as though the quartet of lady writers(Anu Menon, Girvani Dhyani, Advaita Kala, Priya Venkatraman) decided to have fun with Agatha Christie, and never mind the first murder victim is logic. It’s the body count that counts.
Neeyat is the kind of lazy crime thriller where the suspects seem oblivious of their own guilt until the screenwriters remind them what they are really in for. The plot is brazenly lifted from Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and then turned inside-out with suspects piling up with motives so planted they belong to a hot house.
At one point Danesh Razi–so riveting in Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy, here cast as the resident butler-cum-concierge Tanveer—is seen running in the snowstorm with a suitcase and tripping on his face.
This is so much like what the plot does to its vast array of arrey-re-re characters: constantly tripping them to the point where the murder mystery ends up being a muddle mystery.
The performances range from the restrained(Vidya Balan, Shahana Goswami) to the supremely strained.I never thought I would live to see the wonderful Neeraj Kabi and Rahul Bose hamming on screen. The latter plays a gay character named Mistry. Just why he is so over the top is … well a Murder Mistry.
Just why Neeyat had to be made is a bigger mystery than anything in the plot. Diluted by constant cockiness, felled by its own lack of ambitions, and sporadically bolstered by Balan’s endeavour to play Bobby Jasoos without the social message, Neeyat is as confused as it is confusing.