Jack (Konchem Krack) Review

By sheer accounting of talent, Jack should have been a shoo-in. It stars Siddu Jonnalagadda, coming off the success of his DJ Tillu franchise; Vaishnavi Chaitanya, the bona fide breakout actor of Baby; and a slate of dependable actors like Naresh and Prakash Raj. Herding the cast is famed director Bommarillu Baskar. Yet, from its very opening scene - featuring an AI-drawn montage with a voice-over by Prakash Raj - the film underwhelms. What follows is two hours of bad writing, bad scoring and bad camera work, made no better by the cast's overeager performances.

Jack follows maverick Pablo Neruda, intent on joining RAW, India's premier government intelligence agency. Coming off the job interview after having shown his hopefully-new bosses his suitcase full of qualifications - expertise in hacking, pickpocketing, and jiu-jitsuing out of capers - he is so confident he has bagged the job that he gets cracking on his own on a high-stakes terrorism case.

As he chases down criminals, he is tailed by Afshaan (Vaishnavi Chaitanya), the owner of CAT Detective Agency, a firm Pablo's father (played by Naresh) hires to suss out his son's profession. The plot revolves around the many comedic run-ins and mix-ups between Pablo - who also goes by the name Jack, as in "jack of all trades" - and RAW agency head Manoj Kumar (Prakash Raj), as they step over each other's toes trying to nab the same terrorist group.

Ironically living up to its title, Jack dabbles in themes half-heartedly, flitting between situational comedy and hard-boiled action, patriotic rhetoric and mother sentiment, with the non-committal enthusiasm of a child with ADHD. Sometimes within the same scene, one actor performs lightheartedly while another interjects with a heartfelt plea, and the background score hops between its disparate tones as abruptly as if it were a late-night variety sketch show. Embarrassingly poor computer graphics and other AI-drawn crap imagery further add to the sense that this isn't a real movie.

Jack is a step backwards for Siddu, who may be eager to leave behind his DJ Tillu persona but is called upon to deliver Tillu-isms any time the screenplay slacks - which is very often. By the climax, the pretense that this is a new film and not some extension of the Tillu universe is dropped. Jack may be a RAW agent, but in the climax, once the action scenes are disposed of, Siddu slips into the glib, fast-talking avatar of the gully-boy DJ, even his body language adopting that loose-limbed swagger, and it is like watching him do a distorted beta Tillu.

Vaishnavi Chaitanya's budding stardom means she gets more scenes than the plot requires and shows up inexplicably in places to, more or less, accommodate the "romance" angle of the plot. The flirty scenes between Jack and Afshaan are more on the sibling spectrum than anything really arousing.

Undoing more reputations, the film uses Achu Rajamani for music and the prolific Navin Nooli for editing. I would have been hard-pressed to believe that Achu, who gave us the profound soundtrack of Month Of Madhu (2023), was also responsible for the horrendously cringey "meow" soundbyte that accompanies every Afshaan scene (because "CAT" Detective Agency).

Except for the odd fight scene where the camerawork looks painstakingly put together, or the odd joke that lands, Jack is a work of excruciating mediocrity with so much amiss that it never stood a chance at being close to good. From its clashing tones to its inept, half-hearted writing and glaring overuse of bad AI, this is a film best hidden from the filmographies of its otherwise worthy cast and crew.