'Kennedy' Movie' Review: Rahul Bhat & Sunny Leone starrer is not Anurag Kashyap's best work but...

Cast: Rahul Bhat, Sunny Leone, Abhilash Thapliyal, Mohit Takalkar

Director: Anurag Kashyap

Language: Hindi

Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy begins with a quote of William Wordsworth about poets, their gladness, and madness, and despondency. This could also reflect on the characters in the film. The first shot shows Kennedy, the washed out hero, peeling an apple while smoking a cigarette. The never-ending peel comes off smoothly, the man knows how to strip something naked.

Despite the music in the background, there’s devastating silence that surrounds the room and maybe the protagonist’s life. An appropriately bruised Rahul Bhat is trapped between an unhappy past and an uncertain future. You can see there’s a lot happening even when the characters stay quiet. The setting is the pandemic, and the emptiness on the streets only makes Kennedy aka Uday Shetty’s job easier. The screen goes black after every few minutes and tells us about the number of nights remaining for THE NIGHT. It’s a cliffhanger and the reveal is partly amusing. Wikipedia describes Bhat’s character as an insomniac police officer that has gone rogue. And it’s thrillingly fitting since Kashyap’s fondness for noir has been known to all his fanatics and critics. And since the film is about an insomniac, the best city to choose to tell his story can be Mumbai, a city that never sleeps.

There’s also something mysterious about Sunny Leone, who plays Charlie, the ever smiling charmer who compliments Kennedy’s jacket in their first encounter and meets him again at a bar. As their encounters increase, their relationship gets more visceral.

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Even when Kennedy is a man of limited words, the lyrics in the music do a fine job of throwing hints of his traumatic past and tumultuous future (The poems in the film are written by Aamir Aziz and his partner in crime in the music is Boyblanck). Taking cue from the iconic line from The Sixth Sense, Kashyap makes Kennedy see dead people who have been his victims.

There’s an operatic feel even to the unflinching violence and humor Kashyap establishes in his scenes. There’s something gorgeous about the way he shoots brutality. The stretch involving jokes on Covid-19, a quarreling family, and two gruesome murders in quick succession particularly stands out. The cherry on the cake is a reference to Donald Trump.

Another common find in Kashyap’s films is a chase. Black Friday is a masterpiece, _Gangs Of Wasseypur_ added a comical touch to it, and _Kennedy_ has two chases that end in exhaustion. There are lots of cats and mice in this thriller with their own motivations. After he has eliminated all, Kennedy is still haunted by his past and present both. His enemies are dead, but he’s dead for his loved ones too. For a man whose whole life has been surrounded by darkness, both inside and outside, it’s fitting the final scene of him also ends with Kashyap making the screen go black. All we hear is his mobile’s ringtone. And the sound rarely felt so gutting. Kennedy is not Kashyap’s best, but a lyric of a song asks us ‘Did it succeed in fulfilling the voyeur in you?’ Maybe yes.

Kennedy was screened at Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023. The film will be releasing on Feb 20 on Zee 5

Rating: 3 (out of 5 stars)

WATCH the trailer of Kennedy here:

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