Dacoit
Director: Shaneil Deo
Cast: Adivi Sesh, Mrunal Thakur, Anurag Kashyap
Rating: ★★
Situation: bullets slicing through the air, an entire police force closing in, a rifle your only defence, and your partner right beside you. High stakes, right? Not in the world of Dacoit. Here, right in the middle of what should be chaos, everyone politely pauses for a five-minute conversation between the hero and heroine. The cops hold their fire. The hero delivers his lines like it’s a stage play, not a shootout. Urgency takes a backseat, drama takes over, ‘jaanu’ arrives before ‘jaan’.
Cinematic liberty, did someone say? Yeah, that can be taken when the rest of the film entertains you enough to stay seated.
Directed by Shaneil Deo (and written by Deo and Sesh), the story kicks off with a convicted murderer, Hari (Adivi Sesh), breaking out of jail and planning to take revenge on Juliet (Mrunal Thakur), his former girlfriend who betrayed him and aided in his conviction years earlier. Hari plans to loot a hospital and get Juliet arrested for it. However, circumstances play out differently- and there is a twist in the offing. What happens forms the rest of the plot.
A tried but not tested plot
Dacoit’s biggest flaw is how relentlessly generic its storytelling feels. This is a plot we’ve seen far too often: two people fall in love, one walks away, the other seeks revenge, they reunite, sparks reignite, and everything unfolds exactly as expected. The first half takes its own sweet time setting up the romance between Mrunal and Sesh, but in doing so, it focuses on too many phases of their relationship and loses focus. Set in the COVID times, the film lacks conviction. There’s an entire track about corruption which was headed nowhere ultimately.
The second half does find some emotional footing, with Sesh and Mrunal making a sincere effort to sell the gravity of the situation. At times, it works. But just as often, the film slips into such absurdity that you find yourself chuckling despite yourself. Two people go about looting hospitals as if it were as effortless as plucking a mango off a tree. The film, to its credit, is somewhat self-aware. A character even calls out this very exaggeration about the heist situation within the narrative. Anurag Kashyap has nothing much to do with a half-baked role as a cop.
The music of this bilingual by Bheems Ceciroleo doesn’t make much impact, with Touch Buddy featuring Jonita Gandhi and Pawan Singh being the weakest of the lot. The action isn’t as exhilarating as it should have been for a thriller film.
Overall, Dacoit keeps threatening to take off but never quite leaves the runway. It has all the noise, but none of the lift. By the end, you are not on the edge of your seat, just mildly restless, wondering what could have been if the film had matched its own ambitions.
