With Cuttputlli will Akshay Kumar stumble back to form?

Fairly early on in Cuttputlli, the new serial killer movie on Disney+ Hotstar directed by Ranjit M. Tewari and starring Akshay Kumar, there’s a moment where Kumar’s character, 36-year-old aspiring filmmaker Arjan Sethi, is talking to a producer about his script. Arjan has been researching psychopaths for several years now and has developed a screenplay involving an elusive, psychopathic serial killer. Several producers have already turned him down and Arjan hopes this latest chap agrees to finance his dream project. The producer agrees — but only if the screenplay ends with the serial killer not getting caught. Arjan refuses; he says he has devoted 7 years of his life to “getting the script right” and he will not throw that away, even if it means turning down the money.

Cuttputlli, the official Hindi-language remake of the 2018 Tamil movie Ratsasan (literally, ‘demon’), is easily Kumar’s best acting effort in a while. Over the last 10 months, he has delivered turkeys like Atrangi Re, Bachchan Pandey, Samrat Prithviraj and Raksha Bandhan. In each of these films, Kumar looked distinctly jaded and the lack of peak effort was palpable in each case. Here, though, he throws everything he has into the role of Arjan Sethi, a wannabe filmmaker who becomes a sub-inspector in the Himachal Police (in Kasauli) on compassionate grounds and soon finds himself at the heart of a real-life serial killer drama.

In this context, Cuttputlli’s line about “getting the script right” feels almost as though Kumar were apologising to the audience for his recent poor run. Recently, during a much-publicised interview, Kumar had shouldered blame for his own as well as the rest of Bollywood’s many financial failures since 2019 or so. “Films are not working – it’s our fault, it’s my fault. I have to make the changes; I have to understand what the audience wants. I want to dismantle the way I think about what kind of films I should do.”

Cuttputlli is a good start in that direction, I’d say. The second half feels a little scattered in terms of narrative direction (although that’s true for the original, Ratsasan, as well). And like with most Akshay Kumar films, the romantic pairing—usually with an actress 20-25 years his junior (in this case, Rakul Preet Singh) — feels wildly mismatched. But there are signs that Kumar has indeed taken a long, hard look at his recent work and tried to course-correct.

For one, Kumar’s character here, Arjan Sethi, isn’t an alpha, like so many of his other roles. He has to swallow his pride and accept the sub-inspector’s job when his screenplay is rejected by producer after producer. At his new workplace, a police station in Kasauli, people snigger at him because it’s unusual to see a 36-year-old rookie and they make fun of him as a ‘sifarishi’, somebody who got the job because of familial connections.

This means that Kumar cannot resort to his usual brand of action-comedy: the chest-thumping, Olympian simpleton who’s a son-of-the-soil and gets along with everybody. Cuttputlli places the superstar outside of his comfort zone and especially in the first half, the change of pace does Kumar a lot of good. When the first teenage corpse is discovered, we see Arjan at the crime scene, watching his seniors from beyond the yellow police tapes. He is undeniably excited—this is basically his screenplay come to life—but also very mindful of his own position in the police hierarchy. It’s a delicate balance and I was surprised at the ease with which Kumar pulls it off here.

He is also quite good in the film’s many interrogation scenes here. During the course of the investigation Arjan talks to all sorts of people: parents, children, teachers, bus drivers and occasionally, suspects. Because Arjan is a rookie cop, you can see that he gets better at this game as the film progresses—he learns when to be sympathetic, when to press just a little harder, when to retreat, when to soft but stern and so on.

And, of course, on the odd occasion where comedy is called for in Cuttputlli, Kumar turns to his time-honoured bag of clown tricks. For example, there’s a scene where he pretends to be his own niece’s father upon her request; she has flunked Math and the teacher (Rakul Preet Singh) has called her Dad. Kumar is very, very good in this scene, I felt.

Over the last decade or so, I feel Kumar’s two best performances have come in Jolly LLB 2 and Special 26, respectively. These were both films with strong scripts and memorable one-liners, where Kumar had exceptionally strong back-up in the form of Manoj Bajpayee, Anupam Kher, Saurabh Shukla and so on. Cuttputlli, too, has some convincing supporting roles by Chandrachud Singh and Punjabi actress Sargun Mehta.

And while it isn’t quite as entertaining a film as the other two I mentioned here, Cuttputlli may well be an early sign of an Akshay Kumar resurgence over the next few years.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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