Dhaakad movie review: Kangana Ranaut tries a Lara Croft in a dull, embarrassingly derivative, grossly violent saga

Language: Hindi  Dhaakad is not so much a film as it is a series of embarrassments lasting over two hours, perhaps the most cringe-worthy of all being the song sung by Badshah in the finale with lyrics likening the leading lady to a Quentin Tarantino film. “Tarantino ki dasvi filam hai…” The line unwittingly puts a seal on a mortifying truth: that Dhaakad (meaning: Formidable) is shamelessly derivative. It is not Tarantino though, but the Lara Croft blockbuster franchise starring Angelina Jolie that the team of this Hindi film primarily seems to be mining, right down to the heroine’s look, which includes figure-hugging black outfits of varying lengths and long plaited hair in large parts of the narrative.   Debutant director Razneesh ‘Razy’ Ghai’s Dhaakad stars Kangana Ranaut as the Indian undercover agent Agni. The storyline, for what it’s worth, is about a human trafficking racket led by one Rudraveer (Arjun Rampal) that she is directed to unearth. Rudraveer has a nasty partner called Rohini (Divya Dutta) who was bred in the sex trade herself. Agni’s work takes her from Europe to central India and back.   Along the way, we learn that Agni has a tragic background. The storytelling is so colourless and soulless, however, that watching Dhaakad is equivalent to lying down on a giant block of ice on a winter’s day: it is bound to leave the body feeling cold.  

Ranaut has a penchant for action – we know that – and Dhaakad’s stunt choreography is impressive. But all the skilled, convincing-looking kicks and punches in the world, all the wig and costume changes, all the switches in hair colour cannot possibly compensate for superficial characterisation and a hollow script.   Dhaakad is so unoriginal that the composition of its scenes in the countryside hark back to the Superman saga Man of Steel with Henry Cavill. At least the outdoor shooting is sophisticated and yields several spectacular visuals. The rest of Dhaakad does not even have that.   Agni has what seems like an indestructible body that is left miraculously unscathed when she is in a vehicle that explodes. That’s the least of Dhaakad’s problems considering that men in most Bollywood – and Hollywood – action flicks tend to survive accidents that would be fatal for normal Homo sapiens like you and I. Dhaakad’s problem is far bigger: lack of imagination.   To make up for the vacuum of ideas, extremely violent scenes are inserted into the proceedings at intervals. At one point we get a close-up of Agni poking her thumb through a man’s eye. [caption id=“attachment_10698301” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Arjun Rampal, Kangana Ranaut in a still from the film[/caption] In an Indian film scenario that rarely gives women actors central roles in action flicks, the unwavering focus on Ranaut in Dhaakad should ideally have been a happy development. How though can one celebrate vacuous writing, dull direction and a boring-as-hell result?   In a career spanning 16 years, Ranaut has notched up several memorable performances ( Queen, _Simran_ and _Panga_ to name just a few).

In Dhaakad, she swings from being remarkably bland in most scenes to over-acting in some scenes in which she is in disguise, and doing a good job of bashing up the bad guys.  

There’s also a scene in which we are told that Agni has a rare congenital condition (one that does indeed exist in the real world – I checked) in which her heart tilts towards the right of her chest, unlike most human beings whose hearts lean to the left. I don’t know if this was meant as a joke because of the actor’s very publicly held political ideology; if not, it was inadvertently funny. Over the years, Rampal has made an impression playing the antagonist in films such as Don and Om Shanti Om. Here though, he seems to have been instructed to define his character by a permanent hoarse whisper. In the absence of depth, this amounts to nothing but a gimmick that makes it hard to decipher several of his lines.   Divya Dutta, who has been so good in so many films, hams her way through this one. The only actors who come off looking okay despite the mess all around them are Saswata Chatterjee (Kahaani’s incredibly intimidating Bob Biswas) playing Agni’s boss, and Sharib Hashmi as her work associate.   Ultimately, even the grand reveal in Dhaakad’s climax falls flat because it is completely illogical. Without giving away details, let’s just say Agni was sent on a mission that would inevitably reveal to her a history that the person who sent her on that mission had studiously tried to hide from her. It’s impossible to care enough to give the writers the benefit of the doubt and try to figure out why.   Given all this, the reference in the closing song is laughable, because even the worst of Tarantino is better than the most tolerable parts of Dhaakad and its insipid heroine. Badshah nevertheless insists that the lady is “garam garam” (hot hot), that everyone is obsessed with her but she is beyond everyone’s reach, and “she can take you higher…she’s on fire”. He then adds for good measure, “ABCD uski hoti F se shuru aur U pe khatam” (roughly: her ABCD begins with F and ends with U).” Sounds just about right since the A-B-C of cinema is nowhere to be found in Dhaakad. Rating: 0.5 (out of 5 stars) 

This review was first published when Dhaakad was released in theatres in May 2022. The film is now streaming on Zee5.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial  Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.