Bad Cop vs Bad Cop:
It is baffling. Why would a young director choose to make his debut with a film, as derivative and inane as Kuttey? Nearly thirty years after Pulp Fiction, why is Quentin Tarantino still an inspiration for Aasmaan Bhardwaj, when so many Bollywood gangster movies have already cannibalised it?
Kuttey is also a distant cousin of his father Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey (2009), though that film at least had some humour and better performances to redeem it. Senior contributes to the screenplay and music of this film, though the viewer would be hard pressed to find a single watchable scene in this shoot-abuse-repeat mess. Actors like Naseeruddin Shah, Tabu, Konkona Sensharma, Ashish Vidyarthi gamely agreed to do small parts, because that’s how the Bollywood cliques function. (The director makes a brief cameo too).
Like Pulp Fiction, Kuttey is divided into prologue, epilogue and chapters, with cheeky titles like Moong Ki Dal. It starts with a cop called Paaji (Kumud Mishra) being handed a grenade and Anurag Kashyap (playing a politician) getting his head chopped off by Naxal leader Lakshmi (Konkona Sensharma, taking her role too seriously). She and her band of rebels exist within driving distance of Mumbai! Anyway, they are not required till the end, the ‘chapters’ in between are full of corrupt cops, gangsters, and a loved-up couple all after a van of looted money.
The binding force is not plot development or momentum, but that scorpion and frog fable that was better integrated in the recent Darlings; here it is meant to emphasize the animal-like venality of all the characters, which just means there is not a single likeable one in that bunch, so what’s the incentive to watch a boring film?
Arjun Kapoor as bad cop Gopal, who is partnered with Paaji, does not even have the acting chops to convincingly play evil. That is left to Tabu, as their superior Poonam, who is cynical and vicious, but she has a reason for her greed—she wants to move out of matchbox-sized police quarters that are not even big enough to stretch (angdai is the poetic word used).
Guns are apparently easily available in Mumbai, and everybody knows how to use one—even the gangster’s (Naseeruddin Shah) young daughter (Radhika Madan), who wants to elope with a minion (Shardul Bharadwaj). Every character is potty-mouthed, there has to be at least one scene of a man peeing in the open, but worse, random mass murders in public places are ignored, as if they were a daily occurrence.
Hindi cinema comes out with films like this, and then they wonder what is keeping people away from theatres. Tamil release Varisu whips Kuttey at the box-office, not because it’s a great film, but at least it attempts to please its audience.
