Good action and little else in Kangana starrer

Dhaakad

Hindi (Theatres)

Director: Razneesh Ghai

Cast: Kangana Ranaut, Arjun Rampal, and Sharib Hashmi

The role of an action heroine in ‘Dhaakad’ is a welcome change for Kangana Ranaut. The film features a strong female lead and is without a love subplot – a rarity in mainstream Indian cinema.

The film has the potential to make viewers feel a surge of adrenaline, but the storyline is abysmal. Writing-wise, Dhaakad is somewhat formulaic and uninteresting, and there is no doubt that it’s the action and choreography departments that deserve all the accolades.

Considering high calibre actors such as Divya Dutta, Saswata Chatterjee and Arjun Rampal on board, the antagonists’ characters were where the writing had the most scope, and perhaps making their characters more complex could have acted as a coherence to the overall plot. In contrast, the antagonists were drab and uninteresting.

The action-packed second half of the picture keeps the audience hooked to the screen the entire time.

It’s a film with various settings — ranging from Bhopal to Budapest. The film appears to have a high production value in terms of aesthetics (location, cinematography, etc.). Still, the film may look and feel like being made by dilettantes for film aficionados.

Costumes, sets, and action in the film are reminiscent of classics like Kill Bill and Sin City, yet another instance of the mainstream Hindi film industry’s unoriginality.

The content comes off as consciously exaggerated, explicitly tailored to the tastes of the Indian market.

The bloodshed that the protagonist endures while still surviving, recovering, and completing her goal would put the Navy Seals to shame. Try, as one would, to make sense of the plot, but their brains would melt away into mush. The film revolves around the theme of human trafficking. Still, typical of mainstream Hindi cinema, it fails to connect with the underlying issue.