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Release date:
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January 25, 2017
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Director:
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Sanjay Gupta
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Cast:
Language:
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Hrithik Roshan, Yami Gautam, Rohit Roy,
Ronit Roy, Narendra Jha, Suresh Menon, Girish Kulkarni. Guest appearance:
Urvashi Rautela
Hindi
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It is a fascinating
idea: the perfect crime committed by a blind man whose other senses are so
sharp that he can do things a seeing person could not. To expand that outline into
a full-length feature though would require an investment of thought. Sanjay
Gupta’s Kaabil lacks thought and much
else.
The Internet tells
me Kaabil’s budget was Rs 50 crore-plus. I
am flummoxed by where that money went since the film’s production quality and
special effects are so abysmal that I suspect there may be talented software engineers
who have pulled off better student assignments. The sets look unintentionally stagey,
Mumbai’s familiar external locations look plastic (as if the stars were
super-imposed on existing footage), and scenes that are completely CGI-dependent
– such as a fire caused by a blast in a godown – are poorly done.
(Spoilers ahead for those who have not seen the trailer)
All this mediocrity
is wrapped around Rohan and Supriya Bhatnagar, he a dubbing artist, she an NGO
employee. Both are blind. When Supriya is raped, the police look away because
her rapists are well connected. Rohan decides to avenge her, knowing that investigators
would find it hard to imagine a blind man being capable (kaabil) of meticulous
planning and physically demanding execution. The bulk of the film is devoted to
the manner in which Rohan gets back at the men who got after his wife.
(Spoiler alert ends)
First, for a film
that is meant to be a thriller, I can think of only one OMG moment – and that
one has nothing to do with Rohan’s schemes. It comes when a significant detail
of the crime is revealed to Rohan by the rapist’s powerful politician brother.
Rohan’s revenge is far less gasp-inducing than way better cinematic works we
have already seen about persons with disabilities (PwDs) who possess phenomenal
abilities.
(Another spoiler alert) The Mumbai Police
should feel deeply insulted by a film in which a criminal does not bother to
wear gloves but is not found out because cops do not lift fingerprints off the
crime scenes. Nope, it does not occur to anyone to do so, not even that seemingly
intelligent senior officer (Narendra Jha) to whom the chap had given advance
intimation of his intent to commit those crimes.
Likewise, a woman
commits suicide but the police do not do even a cursory check of her room, which
would have led them to discover her suicide note. I know, I know, the Indian
police are notoriously inefficient (Exhibit No. 1: the Arushi Talwar case), but
these celluloid police are worse than anything we know of their real-life
counterparts. (Spoiler alert ends)
The absurdly amateurish
writing is far less objectionable than the film’s pretence that it cares about
women. Kaabil is a perfect illustration
of the male gaze. It is purportedly the story of a husband and a wife, the
story of a woman who was raped and the man’s vendetta, but what it is in truth
is a sympathy fest for the husband while the wife remains an ephemeral figure
whose mindset and trauma the film barely explores.
Supriya is not a
being unto herself. She exists in Kaabil
solely so that the hero can fall in love with her and then display his machismo
by punishing those who wronged her.
It is also terribly
jarring to see an ‘item’ song in which the camera lasciviously examines a near-naked
woman’s body in the middle of a film claiming to object to sexual violence
against women. Such insensitivity can only come from a filmmaker feigning
concern. For the record, my position on objectification is not as black and
white as anti-feminists may lazily assume. For more on that, please read this
article which is among the many I have written on the subject: The Naked Truth.
Context matters.
Finesse in thriller
writing and technical polish may not matter as much to some viewers as Hrithik
Roshan does. Kaabil is a letdown on
that front too. The thing about Roshan is that when he is good, he can be very
very good, when he is bad, he can be Yaadein-level
bad. The best that can be said about his performance as Rohan in Kaabil is that he has, in the past, been
worse.
If you have not suffered
Yaadein, FYI that is one of the films
that marked the beginning of the end of Subhash Ghai. Roshan hammed his way
through it. This beautiful-looking star needs a meticulous director to control
him as an actor. His father Rakesh Roshan, Ashutosh Gowariker with Jodhaa Akbar and a couple of others have
managed him well so far. He needs to seek out more like them. It is hard to
understand how Roshan Senior, as the producer of Kaabil, tolerated this averageness.
It does not help
Roshan Junior that Yami Gautam delivers a far more controlled performance as
Supriya. There is a marked contrast between her work and his distractingly laboured
effort at playing blind. Gautam needs to be commended for doing a fair job with
her role despite the limited writing of her character.
The word “kaabil” is used with two meanings in
this film: “worthy” and “capable”. The first is articulated in the title song “Main tere kaabil hoon, ya tere kaabil nahin”
which here translates into, “Am I worthy of you or am I not?”
The film’s primary
preoccupation is the other meaning though: Is he “capable” of ‘protecting’ his woman? Sanjay Gupta may argue that he is
turning stereotypes of PwDs on their head with his portrayal of an
extraordinarily able blind man, but his definition of kaabil when placed in the context of disability simply perpetuates
patriarchal notions of manhood, masculinity and what it means to be an ‘asli mard’. Read: physically strong, physically
flawless.
It is disappointing
that this film should come from the producer who directed and co-wrote Koi… Mil Gaya, which starred Hrithik
Roshan. C’mon Messrs Roshan, you are better than this.
The kindest review
I could give Kaabil is to say it is
not unbearable. What it is is commonplace, unremarkable, unthinking and shoddy.
Rating
(out of five stars): *
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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139 minutes
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