AK Vs AK, A Gimmick Gone Haywire

AK Vs  AK(Netflix)

Starring Anil Kapoor, Anurag Kashyap

Directed  by Vikramditya  Motwane

Rating: ** 1/2 

Like the  gimmick that one AK pulls  on another in this interesting misfire  script(whoever wrote  it should be  awarded  the  Pulitzer  and  Nobel combined), the  film  too goes  wrong from script to  execution. This one helluva botched -up dark satire  plays  a mean-spirited Tom & Jerry game with  audiences’ perceptions , givingAnil Kapoor  ‘The Star’, in all his pompous glory , the  honour of  being hounded  and chased down  by  AnuragKashyap …yes. the  very same ‘Noire Director’ who  decides to teach  AK The Selfstyled Superstar a  lesson  he is not likely to forget easily. 

We  won’t forget it  either.

So what  does Kashyap do? He  kidnaps Anil Kapoor’s daughter and  then shoots a real-time thriller where the  Star must find his daughter(Sonam  Kapoor Ahuja, doing the worst  kidnapped-daughter impersonation I’ve ever seen  on screen) before it’s “too late”.Too late for  what,  who’s to say? Everyone  connected with this monstrous misfire is busy being envelope-pushingly smart.   

      The mock-docu-drama.  shot  like  a real-time  episode of a reality-show, comes off far less clever than  an episode of  Bigg Boss.Out of the two  actors(here’s a  secret:  one of them is  actually a  director who  thinks he can act, but sshhh) one of them  is constantly on a  wheezing hyper-ventilating hysteria trip. The  other one wears  the  look of  a smug cat who  got all the milk. 

We don’t know what the  secret joke between the AKsis.They seem  to think that  the audience, habituated as  it is  to  believing anything the stars tell them,  would actually believe  that Kashyap  and Kapoor hate each other , so much so that they decided to shoot a film celebrating their hatred. Oh,come on! 

 What we see on screen probably had the  entirely team doubling up with laughter.Toooo  toooo woke , yaar. 

 What we see is not just unamusing but highly  annoying.The entire Kapoor family participates  in  the most voluble  dumb-charade game on  the planet. At one  point Anil  Kapoor’s brother Boney shows up. Blessedly he doesn’t try to act like Boney Kapoor playing BoneyKapoor. The rest of the cast seems to  enjoy playing mimic version  of their own self. None more so than Anil’s  son Harshvardhan  who shows  up for the  most bizarre cameo  I’ve ever seen any  actor  perform.

 Harshvardhan raves and  rants, he  writhes  on  the floor. He  does all he can to attract  Anurag Kashyap’s attention. The  bratty performance get  lost in  a swamp of attention-grabbing sequences that  jump at us  from  the  self-aware  cockiness  of a director has just discovered the pleasures  of rawness.

The film wears the unpolished  look of   horror films featuring  “real footage” of  inexplicable phenomena.Parts  of  Anil  Kapoor’s chase to track down his  daughter(there’s even his  son-in-law making anxious inquiries  on  the  phone) across crowded lanes of Mumbaiare  filmed with a rising tension that  never quite reaches  a crescendo in  even one sequence.

  You have  exactly  twenty seconds  to decide whether you want to watch a  wildly off-kilter  film about a director staging a crime to get interesting footage  on camera. Your time starts now.