Kadak Singh Movie Review: Pankaj Tripathi & Sanjana Sanghi’s performances are saviours in a mediocre thriller

Director: Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury

 Cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Sanjana Sanghi, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Jaya Ahsan, Paresh Pahuja

Language: Hindi

The story of Kadak Singh is about one of the sharpest and finest officers of the Department of Financial Crimes (DFC), A.K. Srivastava (Pankaj Tripathi).  Kadak Singh is a workaholic who does his job with honesty, but somewhere down the line he neglects his family. After a suicide attempt he gets admitted in the hospital for retrograde amnesia. He doesn’t completely forget everything, but the saddest part is he forgets his own daughter (Sanjana Sanghi). Her daughter is completely wiped out from his memory.

It is his daughter, who realises that Kadak Singh was so Kadak (strict) and most importantly strong that could never commit suicide. It is she who takes upon the job of narrating his life to Singh (Pankaj Tripathi) to understand what went wrong in their relationship and how he lands up in the hospital. There are people who are trying to help Singh come out of the mess that he is in, while some of his colleagues in the office try to play nasty. But from the very beginning, it is very obvious who the criminals are. Yet there is something that is very gripping about the story. But what it lacked was a tighter screen play.

We are all aware of the brilliant performer Pankaj Tripathi is and how effortlessly he fits into any role, but it is also a pleasure to see the way Sanjana Sanghi has worked on herself. The actress has truly come a long way since the first time she was seen in Dil Bechara opposite Sushant Singh Rajput. But sometimes or rather most of the times, I felt that Pankaj Tripathi’s character wasn’t explored well. He is one of the brightest craftsmen in the entertainment industry, but most of the time he was just trying to be witty. And when we have all noticed over the years that doing serious roles with a comical twist is Tripathi’s forte, he could have done it a little better. I guess it was the director’s job to make the look of the movie better, which he clearly didn’t put much thought into. By the look of the movie, I mean the visuals. Kolkata has so much to offer in terms of visuals, but sadly that wasn’t utilised.

The story of Kadak Singh was engaging no doubt, but it is predictable. Considering it is a film based in Kolkata, he could have romanticised the place a little bit if not much. The movie lacked visuals.

One of the best performances was delivered by Parvathy Thiruvothu who played the role of a nurse who was patient, humane and took good care of Kadak Singh and was always ready to listen to his stories, his confusion and grievances. Singh’s relationship with the nurse has been beautifully explored and it really touched my heart, rather than the one shared by Jaya Ashan and Pankaj Tripathi. The relationship hardly made any sense, in fact, they were more like sex buddies and there was absolutely no depth in their relationship.

Jaya Ashan who plays the role of Tripathi’s girlfriend hardly spoke and when she spoke it appeared like Greek to me. Her Hindi was as disastrous as her Bengali and here she plays the role of a literature teacher. Good Lord, I must say, a literature teacher needs to be articulate and here she is struggling to express herself. Jaya Ashan seriously needs to go through acting workshops and diction coaches before taking up a role. Her eyes were equally expressionless. This export from Bangladesh just didn’t work at least for this film.

Kadak Singh could have been handled in a mature way and it could have been more impactful too, but I believe it was a failure on the part of the director. It had everything, starting from the leading good cast to a decent story. But, it appeared like filmmaker, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury was in a hurry to catch a bus to Goa to do the screening at IFFI.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Kadak Singh is streaming on Zee 5

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