Saakini Daakini is much more fun than the original

Sudheer Varma’s Saakini Daakini, the Telugu adaptation of the 2017 Korean action-adventure Midnight Runners, captures all the goofiness of the original. And then some more. It is a surprisingly intelligent adaptation with the two original male police trainees, played by Park Seo-joon and Kang Ha-neul converted into two female cadets.

This is where the fun quotient in the original is massively expanded in the remake, rendering Saakini Daakini one of the smartest Indian adaptations from a foreign source. Everything in the Telugu adaptation (written by Akshay Poolla) is self-assertingly silly. And no harm in that. Silliness in cinema is problematic only when it is unintended. Here, the stakes for stupidity are high.

Casting two fabulously feisty actresses in place of the male players is a master-stroke…or maybe I mean mistress-stroke. The self-aware daffy feminism of the two women cadets as they set off to crack a human-trafficking ring one night after serious clubbing and drinking, is a new concept for Indian cinema.

Films starring female heroes come with a price: if you, as a woman, are being given the “privilege” of helming the show, you better take the responsibility seriously. But hell, in Saakini Daakini, the very talented Regina Cassandra and Nivetha Thomas are just not in the mood to be flagbearers of feminism. These girls, our own Madonnas, just want to have fun with their parts.

I don’t know if Regina and Thomas are friends in real life. But their chick-flick bromance is so bang-on it feels like much more than a screen bonding. Seldom do two actresses get a chance to play comic heroes. Nivetha Thomas (she played Taapsee Pannu’s role in the Telugu version of Pink) and Regina Cassandra (typecast in serious weepy roles) let their hair down, put their feet up and take us for a rollicking joyride.

Although a remake, Saakini Daakini is its own beast. Revved-up and roaring with feminine power, the adrenaline just flows. It has terrific action pieces where the girls seem to be doing their own stunts and doing them pretty passionately. Since Nivetha has the louder, more extroverted role, she would be perceived by Indian standards of performance rating, the better performer among the two. But Regina in the quieter more reserved role, strikes equal gold.

These two ladies seem to be having as much fun in their girls-night-‘ouch’ fiesta as Shabana Azmi, Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi in the 1982 Hindi chick flick Ashanti. The female fun fest in that film was bogged down by too many extraneous interventions. Each of the heroines had boyfriends and back stories.

None of that nonsense for the devilishly fun-fuelled femme fatales in the film. I am not saying this a great film. It’s just a whole lot of unassuming straight-from-the-hip fun. It didn’t work at the Telugu box-office because, you see, female heroes were shown doing what only male heroes are allowed to: drinking, cursing, fighting, having fun. It is on Netflix now. So let the party begin. And to hell with patriarchal protocol.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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