Film: Blank
Date: 03.05.2019
Director: Behzad Khambata
Writers: Pranav Adarsh, Pradeep Atluri (concept) (as Pradip Atluri)
Stars: Sunny Deol, Karan Kapadia, Karanvir Sharma, Ishita Dutta
The film opens with the hero/ Karan Kapadia wearing dark glasses and walking down a crowded street. Suddenly, a bike hits him and he is wheeled inside a hospital. The doctors getting him ready for the surgery discover a bomb attached to his heart and have to wait till the bomb is extracted.
A few hours later, the boy rises from his bed, pulls out all the tubes from his body and stumbles out of the ICU. When he is stopped by the hospital aid/ guard/ doctor he ruthlessly bashes them all and is about to flee, when ACP Devang/ Sunny Deol and his team nab him and lock him in a solitary cell.
When he is brought in for interrogation, the young boy feigns loss of memory and dramatically asks ‘Main kahn hoon, mujhe kuchyaad nahi aa raha…’
Flashbacks of fire and mayhem haunt the narrative and just when we are about to get into the mind of the young man, he is hijacked by muffler draped terrorists. Somehow the police get him back to the prison but and a few scenes later, he flees again and if all this sounds confusing well, that is the intention.
Post interval it all about the search for the drug peddlers, the terrorists, and 23 more human bombs. The chase drags endlessly and despite your best efforts you are unable to focus on what’s going on. The narrative is flawed the characters illogical and unconvincing.
Sunny Deol in a crucial scene tells his senior that they have no time to waste, yet when on mission he strolls like he is in a garden. In another scene at the police station, Deol screams like he has lost his way out of Gadar. And most important, which cop on duty ever disconnects his phone just because his wife is delivering a baby; writer Adarsh and director Khambata please get real!
There’s more, Karan Kapadia who has suffered a near fatal accident walk out of the hospital without surgery. Kapadia has a bomb attached to his heart that a team of experts cannot decode but Karan is able to extract this bomb like a super hero in the climax!
On the brighter side it is refreshing to watch women cast as cops and guards, Karanveer Sharma and Ishita Dutta suit the part. Karan Kapadia is confident and delivers his lines but Sunny Deol is disappointing.
No ratings for Blank because I choose to blank out.
Bhawana Somaaya/ @bhawanasomaaya