Quirky and intense in equal measure, Shahid Kapoor lends a certain edge to his characters which makes them highly watchable. His screen personalities come across as a wild blend of cockiness, vulnerability, cynicism and a wicked sense of humour. Think of all his important movies – Haider, Kaminey, Udta Punjab, Kabir Singh, Bloody Daddy – and the web series Farzi, you realise he is far too different from other star-actors. Actually, his performances make many of them, including top ones, look school-boyish.
As a morally dubious cop in Deva, a Hindi remake of Prithviraj Sukumaran-starrer Mumbai Police, he proves again that he is a powerhouse actor who has for long been underrated. While cop roles for protagonists are a routine in Hindi movies, few actors offer any variety to them, rendering them flat and stereotypical, even when they are written and fleshed out well. Shahid Kapoor lends them appreciable nuancing to make them stand out as distinct personalities. It’s time his formidable talent received due acknowledgement from cinema lovers. But he should also be wary of walking into the stereotype trap. He is good at being the bad boy, but every role need not be in the Kabir Singh mould.
For those who have already watched Mumbai Police, Deva would come across as a massy version of it with more flair added to the protagonist without much diversion from the core premise. For those who haven’t, it would be a delicious treat of intrigue and unpredictability to a cop story. Dev Ambre (Shahid Kapoor) loses his memory after an accident and fails to retrace his identity. He must put together pieces of his past to solve a murder mystery he has been probing. The plot, involving three friends and a betrayal, is clever, with twists designed to keep the viewer guessing. We won’t go further on the plot because it might kill the suspense.
The original story had holes that the writer quartet of Bobby, Sumit Arora, Arshad Syed and Hussain Dalal could have covered in the remake and there are loose ends that could have been tied up. The massiness does not quite fit into the gravitas of the plot. But that doesn’t diminish the central theme much, because the story-telling is engaging for the most part. Director Rosshan Andrrews does a rather good job of shifting his 2013 Malayalam thriller to a more commercial action zone. If only he had the glitches in the plot fixed!
Deva, however, brings the wisdom in remaking good regional movies for the Hindi audience into question again. It’s possible that the audience has watched its dubbed or subtitled version of the original already thanks to OTT platforms. In that case, the potential viewer base is reduced considerably. Vedha, starring Hrithik Roshan and Saif Ali Khan, was brilliant but it suffered commercially. So is the case with other remakes of Southern movies. It’s time they shifted fully to the dubbed versions of the original, like in the case of Pushpa, KGF and Baahubali.
(By arrangement with Perspective Bytes)
