Dhaakad Movie Review: Kangana Is A Showstopper In Dhaakad

Dhaakad

Starring Kangana Ranaut, Arjun Rampal, Divya Dutta,Saswata  Chatterjee

Directed  by Razneesh Ghai

Rating: ****

Don’t let those  pouty reviews about no-substance-all-style  discourage you. Dhaakad  is  a killer of an actioner. Its  fights are so furious  I  could feel  the bone crunching and the teeth smashing against righteously aggressive  fists of fury.

And besides what  substance did  Hum ….Aapke Hain Koun boast of? Not that I am  comparing the two. But Dhaakad too relies almost entirely on treatment and execution. And kudos to  debut director  Razneesh Ghai for making the violence look so dirgefully dynamic; the  bloodshed feels like  a blizzard of remorse  showered on an unrepentant conscience.

Gory? Yes!  Violent? Of course! We  live in a violent  world where an eye  for an eye is not enough. It’s more  like  a limb for an eye. Seeing Kangana in the killer mode is reward enough  for  all the time we’ve had to bear with  inept female heroes taking revenge on all mankind for wrong sdone.

 Dhaakad is slyly slick,and  remorselessly violent. It sticks to the point.  And gets to  brass tacks immediately. Kangana  playing a spy named Agnee is assigned by her boss(the very  capable  Saraswat Chatterjee) to extract a human trafficker/drug dealer Rudraveer from his hideout.

That’s it.

As played  by Arjun Rampal, Rudraveer is  a  ruthless  rogue, an evil  unscrupulous son of  a gun who lives  by the nozzle and dies by it. Arjun sports two completely different looks, one for his past (in vivid black and white) showing his beginnings  as a criminal ,and the other for the present where he resembles a  murderous  monk.And if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, so be it.

Who said life is  easy? It is anything but that for Agnee who has  graphic memories of her gruesome past. Redemption comes in the form of a  little  girl whom  Agnee must save to save herself.

 I wish the  narrative  had devoted  a little more  time in developing the bonding between the aloof  Agni and the friendly  beautiful little  girl.  Dhaakad is a film in a hurry. It moves breathlessly from one fabulously-staged fight to  another almost daring us to exhale. There is no time or space for anything but vendetta in Agnee’s ravaged life.

While Kangana and Arjun Rampal roar  in brilliance as adversaries there are three other stand-out performances  by Divya Dutta, Saraswat Chatterjee and the  underrated Sharib Hashmi.

 But the real  star of the show  after Kangana and Rampal is  cinematographer  Tetsuo Nagata. Even when the frames  ooze blood Nagata makes the film look  like  poetry in commotion.