Dacoit Review

A Shakespearean romance doesn't exactly harmonize with a chase-heavy heist subplot, but cinematographer Shaneil Deo (Nisabdham, Goodachari) tries to make the mashup work anyway in his debut directorial venture Dacoit, starring Adivi Sesh and Mrunal Thakur.

Thirteen years have passed since Hari (Adivi Sesh) and Juliet (Mrunal Thakur) separate under extraordinary circumstances that end with Hari getting jailed and Juliet being married-off and becoming a mother. Now they are both in desperate need of cash. Juliet has mounting hospital bills, and Hari is trying to flee the country. They team up to loot a hospital chain run by a corrupt proprietor (played by Prakash Raj). Along the way, they unpack the traumatic events that led to their breakup.

Several elements of Deo's film are distortions of genre character tropes. There's a hardened police officer, Swamy (Anurag Kashyap), with sympathetic leanings toward our tragic duo - except, Swamy has taken up the Ayyappa deeskha and can't touch a gun which makes for some interesting scenes. Hari's old jailmate, Ishaq (Atul Kulkarni), steps in as the unlikely accomplice, helping along their ill-conceived plan. At the centre, though, Hari and Juliet's hasty romance never quite lives up to the epic love of their Shakespearean namesakes (Harry/Romeo and Juliet).

The writing struggles to imbue the characters with any depth beyond their caricatures. Much time is wasted repeating the same robbery-and-chase sequence. Hari and Juliet, being ordinary people, make for terribly ill-prepared robbers who frequently end up in car crashes.

The film attempts to energize itself with a dance number, or an elevation shot, but these are needless and ineffective. A face-off between the characters of Prakash Raj and Anurag Kashyap promises to be exciting, but that narrative thread is abandoned in the same haphazard way it is introduced. We ultimately don't know Hari and Juliet as people, nor care for their bloated, self-inflicted troubles.

Then there is the hard-sell of Adivi Sesh as a heartbroken Romeo. Maybe because of his Adonis looks, he seems to smirk from behind the mask of his character. So it is unfortunate that he picks a role like Hari, this raw-edged Rayalaseema lad who smokes beedis and lives the hard life. Roughing up Sesh's hair and putting on brown makeup still doesn't take away from his metropolitan look. What we see is a distractingly uneven performance and a terrible dubbing job where at times it is hard to even understand what's being said.

The narrative engine that propels the movie is a handful of soap-operatic twists and a ticking clock. The narrative is over-reliant on deadlines and ultimatums as plot devices - Ishaq warns Hari he has only until the end of the week to escape the country; a medical broker makes threatening calls to Juliet for timely bill payments; a phone timer ticks away during the climax. Yet none of these is particularly effective in creating tension, and some are outright silly. The film ends up with just enough accidental momentum to keep its ruse going, but the ending disappoints with its mawkishness.

Arguably, Adivi Sesh and Mrunal Thakur are solid nines by Clavicular's looksmaxxing scale. But no matter how hard the film rubs them together in a scene, no sparks fly. Not even when Hari and Juliet are cuddling in what looks like an elfin land awash in ethereal light, making promises to each other about marriage and children.

Mrunal Thakur brings her characteristic knack for melodrama; she can sell us on her gritty, anxious mother as much as on the glamorous young romantic. But Adivi Sesh is an unreliable scene partner, playing to his own tune.

Dacoit never quite becomes the sweeping love story it wants to be, snagging on its overstuffed plot and underwritten characters. Too soppy to be a heist film and too distracted by its subplots to be an epic romance, it flails between these genres. Nor does it make much of its social commentary on the exploitative practices of hospitals. The movie may have stolen our time but it won't be stealing our hearts.