HIT Movie Review: It is A New Experience For Telugu Cinema!

HIT(Homicidal Intervention Team)

Starring Vishwak Sen, Ruhani Sharma, Murli Sharma

Directed by Sailesh  Kolanu

Rating: ***(3 stars)

Synopsis: Suspense   thrillers are  frequently let down at the end. Sure enough, the denouement  in HIT(a prophetic title, since the  film is a success) hit me  as disappointing. The languorous lazy  way the mystery unravels left a strange aftertaste  of  something missing  .

Missing  girls are  the  key to the  dark noire-ish thriller which  aspires to be something  above the  run-of-the-mill  thrillers in Indian cinema. The last one I saw  was  The Body in Hindi ,and it was as thrilling as molar surgery, and that too an unoriginal  script.

 Hit is  original and it  never lets us forget that it comes from a place of relative ingenuity. The hero is a troubled  borderline depressive  investigative  cop Vikram(played  by  a brooding Vishwak Sen who  lets his beard  do most of  the talking) battling with a trauma in his past.His girlfriend Neha(Ruhani Sharma) has been  kidnapped . Vikram is not allowed to investigate the  case until another girl disappears.He can then  jump in and  go for the jugular.Sorry to say there is  nothing  so imminent  about the investigation.No one  seems  to be  in a  hurry to  solve the  case.

The plot, a simmering mound  of redherrings,  keeps teasing the audiences’ responses  in the hope of catching us unawares  in the  end. But there’s way too many deadend explanatory excursions, and for a  serial-killer thriller there’s  too little  body count  and too little of what  would be deemed  genuine thrills.

 Most of the  narrative plays out in a tranquil  unhurried tone  with the frenetic background  score  persuading us to believe  that there is more to the  conflict than meets  the eye.

Sadly for a dark thriller  the pace is way too uneven, though  luckily we are spared the  usual digressions such as  a comic subplot and frequent song breaks. Not even an  item song in a smoky  tension-filled club! Slow clap. Also, the  cop-hero’s partner in this  film is not a comic sidekick. He  has  anger  issues  of his  own  to deal with.

The sobriety  of   mood goes a long way  in  lending  the narration a surcharged  atmosphere. If  only the  endgame was  more convincing! Come to think of it, I am yet to see a whodunit  in Indian cinema which doesn’t end in  a whimper.  Hit  averts being a complete letdown by a hair’s breadth. What keeps us watching is the no-nonsense mood and  a determination to shed all the  perks and plumes  of  traditional Telugu cinema.The hero is  no Jake Gittes  from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.But  if  you aim low, Hit delivers  the punches in  places.