Bloody Daddy  Is A Bloody Mix Of  Mayhem &  Daddy  Issues

Rating: ** ½

Bloody Daddy has an  intense and focused Shahid Kapoor playing daddy to  a young teenaged son who reacts to every effort  of the father to reach out with, ‘Whatever’ ,‘Dad, Chill’ and whatever jargon  kids use  to  feel cool .

The  script itself tries hard to be urbane, cool and a little chic . Almost the entire plot is set in a 7-star  hotel owned by a sleazy but subliminally wired to be  humane if  needed,  Ronit Roy, who is as usual first-rate. Watch him closely in the  sequence where tries to be  sweet to a  kidnapped boy. Ronit eclipses all the other  talented actors in the room,barring Sanjay Kpaoor who is impossible to  eclipse as he always stands out, and not in a  good way.

The film’s canvas is cluttered with talented actors, mostly male,  trying hard to grind their  teeth and  look sinister while  also making  every effort to show us they are having fun with fangs. The efforts to  be ‘cool’ are constantly shot down by  a plot that keeps shooting itself in the foot.

This story of desperate father trying to get his  kidnapped son back in exchange of a  huge consignment  of cocaine  is  so keen on being constantly ahead  of  the audience that after a point the game of catch-me-if-you-can begins to seem tiresome.

Nonetheless Shahid Kapoor keeps the  boat from toppling over. He is nasty when he is required to be. But occasionally his  character  Sumair surprises us by displaying a sensitive side especially when dealing with the novice bartender Bunty(Vikram Mehra ,endearingly naïve) or in the  later portions with his  son. It is a complex inherently self-contradictory character  who  trips over traps he himself  lays  and ultimately succeeds in swimming against the tides.

The  film has some  highspeed  chase sequence  which are well shot. The canvas and the camerawork are impressively eyecatching. I wonder why the bloody hell is Bloody Daddy(what am awful title for a film about a  father  trying to rescue his son from peril) playing for free on JioCinema?

Another thing: why is the lovely Diane Penty  always cast in underwritten roles? She stands tall, in more ways than one, even when pitched against veterans like Rajeev Khandelwal and Shahid Kapoor. Ah, Khandelwal… nice to see  him play wicked with such enthusiasm. Almost every character  is trigger happy as they run around  the  hotel’s lobby while  a lavish wedding  goes on.

The constant collision of  celebration and  violence must have seemed exciting to those who wrote the script. But this story has been  done twice before: in French as Sleepless Night and  in Tamil as  Thongaa Vaanam. Do we really want to watch the second Indian remake  of a middling French  film?

There is  a standing joke in Bloody Daddy about men barging into the ladies’ washroom of  a luxury hotel, and  about a Nepali chef in the pantry  of the same hotel innocently helping Sumair pack aata(flour) in packets in place of cocaine.

Cooking and  cocaine…well done, It is the cleverest  subtext  in a  film so obsessed with pace  it leaves us breathles

The constant collision of  celebration and  violence must have seemed exciting to those who wrote the script. But this story has been  done twice before: in French as Sleepless Night and  in Tamil as  Thongaa Vaanam. Do we really want to watch the second Indian remake  of a middling French  film?

There is  a standing joke in Bloody Daddy about men barging into the ladies’ washroom of  a luxury hotel, and  about a Nepali chef in the pantry  of the same hotel innocently helping Sumair pack aata(flour) in packets in place of cocaine.

Cooking and  cocaine…well done, It is the cleverest  subtext  in a  film so obsessed with pace  it leaves us breathless