Kaabil movie review: Hrithik Roshan’s film revives rape-and-revenge cliches (original) (raw)

Kaabil movie review: Yami Gautam’s act, in this Hrithik Roshan-starrer, includes a permanent unblinking wide-eyed stare.

Kaabil movie cast: Hrithik Roshan, Yami Gautam, Ronit Roy, Rohit Roy, Narendra Jha, Girish Kulkarni
Kaabil movie director: Sanjay Gupta
Kaabil movie rating: 1.5 stars

Can Hrithik Roshan act? No question about it. Can Hrithik hack it, in Kaabil, a film that gives him every opportunity to gain lost ground? That’s a toughie. Because apart from the leading man, there is not one thing to keep us with the film.

Two strands knit Kaabil. One is the romance between two people who cannot see. Rohan (Hrithik Roshan) and Supriya (Yami Gautam) meet on a blind date, dreadful pun fully intended, and discover feelings that will last a lifetime. Except a tragedy befalls the couple, and then things gone awry.

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The other track is rape-and-revenge, a combo not seen for a while in big budget Bollywood with their pretty, safe love stories. Kaabil dusts it off and resurrects it, but brings back every single cliche that goes with the territory: lascivious hoods, intimidating netas, and cops on the take.

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The challenge with doing a film whose beats are stacked from its opening frame is to insert surprise. Instead, Kaabil plays it strictly by the numbers, and you can see everything coming from a mile.

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Yami Gautam’s act includes a permanent unblinking wide-eyed stare. She is light on her feet but seems to have got caught in a series of no account roles after Vicky Donor. Rohit and Ronit Roy are the baddies, and both come off as they have been instructed to: the former a goonda, the latter a grim, glowering local heavyweight.

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Kaabil movie review: Ronit Roy and his brother-actor Rohit Roy are the baddies in this Hrithik Roshan, Yami Gautam-starrer.

Hrithik does all the heavy lifting and remains the only bright spot in this dispirited mess of a movie. He still has the moves. What he needs is a plot.

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And did anyone tell those who wrote this film just how distasteful their insistence on using ‘andha ‘ and ‘andhi ‘ repeatedly, is? To use the phrase to express crassness is one thing, but as a constant descriptive just plain unacceptable.