In the end, the darkness of despair gets to you. The feral face-offs between Varun and Nawazuddin captured in the colour of wrath and doom by cinematographer Anil Mehta, confer a vital visceral velocity to the virile vendetta saga. Badlapur takes the cinema of eye for an eye to a new high. But then, that’s the least one expects from Raghavan’s film. It is that ruthlessness of the rootless, a man who has lost everything that Varun portrays with compassion. Varun falters due to inexperience but more than redeems himself in a sequence such as the one where he confesses to Nawazuddin about cold-bloodedly killing a couple. Nawaz and to an extend, Varun bare the souls of their character. A routine Hero Versus Villain premise is uplifted by the stark and stripped-down central performances. Desire is one of the predominant themes in the revenge tale. Finally, Badlapur leaves a lot to be desired. It seeks its strength in the vendetta drama and then loses steam when the hero begins to lose his way in the maze of retribution. to point out the sheer nullity of Raghavan’s life after the revenge would be complete. It takes a social worker, played with empathetic energy by Divya Dutta. There is always room for the drama to slide open slippery doors that lead into unexpected truths about the quality of life lived on the edge of destruction. The tussle of one-upmanship between Raghavan and Laik never lapses into an incoherent and angry jumble of rhetorics and recrimination. What director Sriram Raghavan avoids at any cost is shallowness in the dynamics of vendetta. It’s a remarkable achievement, sadly not matched by all of the screenwriting in this engaging authentic but flawed drama of crime and retribution. He can peer into Laik’s murky soul and find redeemable humour. Rebellious minds can’t see how self-centred their aspirations are. Flawlessly cunning and diabolic he goes from bank robbery to jail term to chronic escapee with a deep understanding of the humour that underlines all anti-social humour. No such problems arise in Nawaz’s performance. But because Varun’s inexperience shows up in sequences that expose his youth.
The sequences showing the hero using sex as a weapon of revenge don’t work not for the lack of intelligent writing. The love-making sequence with Huma Qureshi who plays a prostitute and Laik’s girl is meant to be brutal but ends up being a burlesque of the real thing. There is a woman in a bra and lots of moaning sounds. What follows is unintentionally hilarious. Raghavan and the wrongdoer’s wife proceed to the bedroom. There is a sequence where our hero, rapidly degenerating into a vengeful sociopath tells his wrong-doer that he will forgive him if Raghavan is allowed to sleep with his wrongdoer’s wife.
But they make no real sense out of the material that the script throws into their orbit. So do two new characters played with panache by Vinay Pathak and Radhika Apte. A bag filled with crores of money shows up in the second half to claim primacy as the protagonist in the plot. Raghavan cannot make a film without incorporating the heist element.
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We also don’t know that they will be dead in the next ten minutes, and our hero would shed his heroic skin as the plot progresses from being a human drama to a heist caper with loot that is quite a hoot. We don’t know yet that they are our hero Raghavan’s universe. In a corner, we catch a mother and child heading into their family car. The film opens on a busy road in Pune with traffic, passersby, hawkers and bystanders loitering in camera range. For a large part, Badlapur is an exceptionally engaging drama. Insulated from the outside world Raghav’s festering pain spreads itself out in the narrative spanning a seductive facsimile of reality that jumps off the screen to claim our attention. It’s as if director Sriram Raghavan and his co-writer Arijit Biswas wants to shut out all light from his protagonist Raghavan’s life. Cast in the mould of the greatest redemptive dramas Badlapur has an ambitious ambience of unmitigated doom irrigating almost every frame. As if the tree decided to get even with the axe by cutting off its branches. While the film’s pain-lashed topography in the first overture is exceptional-with every vein on Varun Dhawan’s temples ringing a bell-the second overture gets audacious tongue-in-cheek subversive and sometimes downright silly. Badlapur (2015): “The tree remembers, the axe forgets,” reads a proverb in the opening credits of a film that left me feeling like both the tree and the axe.