Kuttey

Directed by Aasmaan Bhardwaj

Rating: ***

The talented Ashish Vidyarthi gets to be seen in two places this week. He is splendid as an entrepreneurial broker in the new Netflix series Trial By Fire. In Kuttey which is stuffed to the gills with avant garde actors Vidyarthi has little to do except laugh heartily at some vague feeble fable that Tabu cracks about a scorpio and a frog.After a few seconds I stopped listening.

She is also fond of cracking up over her own philosophy of life: “Logic ki maa ki aankh.”

Best wishes to you too.

Pammi, that’s Tabu, could do some better lines. In the meanwhile everybody tries to get the better of one another in this Guy Ritchie-meets-Vishal Bharadwaj kind of crime caper where the incumbent mantra is greed.

I think it was Ayn Rand who once said one needn’t be embarrassed or apologetic about being greedy. Forget Rand. Madonna said, we are living in a material world. Who are we to question her?

Aasmaan, who is Vishal Bhardwaj’s son, certainly believes in letting the gun do all the talking. Heads are blown off randomly, victims are shot pointblank and unnecessarily.In a daring raid at a business man’s place Arjun Kapoor and Kumud Mishra who play disgraced cops get together for a shootout in a posh home where Arjun kills with the confidence of a man who knows the law won’t catch up with him , as he IS the law. Ha ha.

The laughs are distinctly dark. The funniest moment in the selfconsciously designed crime caper is when Naseeruddin Shah playing the baap of crimelords tells his daughter not to go out in the night, as she is to be married in a few days. Daughter, played by Radhika Madan(who always looks as if she had too many spiced papads for lunch) not only goes out , she takes along her father’s favourite minion Shardul Bhardwaj. Soon the two are seen making violent love in the car and doing a Bonny & Clyde version of Romeo & Juliet.

This s a desperately chaotic world filled with immoral gun-toting sociopaths who think it is perfectly fine to shoot their victims pointblank , as the cops are doing the same.

At the end of the two-hour shootouts at waist-land level, I could see Aasmaan struggling to come into his own. There is a second film struggling to emerge from Aasmaan.That should be more Aasman than Vishal Bharadwaj.This is cinema that gets as dark as it can possibly get. There is redemption. Everyone is on a ‘rude’ trip.