Sanak(Disney-Hotstar)
Starring Vidyut Jamwal, Neha Dhupia;Directed by Kanishk Verma
Rating: * ½
Hospital under siege by terrorists?? Hang on…Haven’t we just seen that in Amazon Prime’s Mumbai Diaries? So my advice: stop right here. Do not, repeat NOT, touch this inflammable waste material of a film.
Unless you are okay with action sequences that are choreographed around hospital equipments including pacemakers, walkers, MRI machines and stretchers.Also as a perk we get some unintended laughter. Sample this: when the hero’s love wife(Rukmini Maitra) , who is a patient in the besieged hospital, is held at gunpoint by the villains, the hero asks, ‘Tujhe bachche nahin chahiya kya?’
And I thought, what odd timing for a crucial marital decision.
Sanak, true to its title, in an arrogant impetuous excuse of a film to show off Vidyut Jamwal’s fighting spirit. He does well in some of the action sequences. Each time he gets ready to throw down an adversary he shakes his shoulders vigorously as though there were spiders sitting on them…
Ah,warming up. Sanak never moves beyond the warming, and the warning of the thrills to come remain just a distant thunder. The screenplay which we are told is officially adapted from Nick Cassavates’ 2002 thriller John Q , is filled with gaping holes that no hospital can patch up,certainly not the one that Jamwal and his onscreen opponent Chand Roy Sanyal leave behind at the end.
Sanak is like a steamroller mowing down every bit of logic and good sense in the pursuit of cheap thrills.A little brat (Harinder Singh Alag) who has been spending too much time playing video games on his father’s phone, becomes Jamwal’s accomplice for a while. When Jamwal’s Vivaan asks the boy if he’s ready for some action the boy replies, “I was born ready,Uncle.”
Okay, then.
There is this other distinctly Bengali guy ,a security guard at the besieged hospital who is named Riaz Ahmed.He is the token Good Muslim…you know my name is Khan and I am not a terrorist? The Good Muslim(with a thick Bengali accent) tells our hero Vivaan, “I thought you were Mogambo.You turned out to be Rambo.”
I don’t quite know what means, unless the writer(Ashish Prakash Verma) thinks invoking epic names would give this tacky low-budget film a certain spatial spin. But it’s not budget that’s the real villain. It is the lack of common sense. A hero who hops from floor to floor of the hospital because his wife is held hostage: the motive for one-man-army heroism is as wrong as Bruce Willis hunting down the terrorists in a building because his wife is held hostage. 23 years ago Willis got away with it in Diehard. The world has changed since then. The hero needs to be much more motivated .
In Sanak,the only character motivated beyond the personal is Neha Dhupia .Playing a gritty cop she ploughs through the terror issue with a gravity that the script doesn’t deserve , until her daughter ends up a hostage.Damn,they just can help getting personal.
Villain Chandan Roy Sanyal(with dirty finger nails to offset the heroine ’s perfectly painted and pointed nails) talks of death by 5 cuts. This film is death in spite of many more cuts.
