Telugu thriller Repeat has no repeat value

In this brainless, bordering on the bizarre wannabe suspense thriller, everything that writer authors come true. I wish I knew this writer. I could perhaps request him to write a story where this thrill-less thriller disappears, vanishes at the snap of a finger.

Remake of a hit Tamil film Déjà Vu, Repeat in Telugu (presumably the Telugu audience is not very conversant with French terms) is so awful it makes us forgive all the trespasses of Gangster Gangraju.

Deja Vu, I Repeat, is a stagnant thriller with characters who don’t grow, they groan with the self-importance of overgrown adolescents who want to impress their parents with their sleuthing skills. The scruffy writer Subramanyam( Achyuth Kumar ) who looks like he could do with some fresh air, pens a story about a girl being kidnapped. A girl indeed gets kidnapped. If he knows how this story will pan out in real life, why doesn’t he just write a happy ending rescuing the girl from her kidnappers,and be done with it?

But no. A special cop Vikram Kumar ( Naveen Chandra ) is summoned to solve the case of the writer whose crime stories come true. Naveen Chandra’s Vikram is the kind of scowling bloke who is not so much interested in solving the case as dragging it on so that he can stay relevant to the plot.Apparently, only the portions shot with Naveen Chandra’s Vikram are different in Telugu from the Tamil original.

If Chandra’s scowl of thought is supposed to liven up Repeat, then I repeat, this thriller is as stagnant as ditchwater. The loud background music by Ghibran hammers in the scenes, like nails pounding into a stubborn coffin. This is the kind of film that prides itself for super-smartness but ends up dumbed down by its own inability to hold the plot together.

The characters deliberately behave very oddly. Madhoo — remember her in Mani Ratnam’s Roja?—is now Madhoobala. She plays Asha Pramod a senior cop whose daughter is abducted. In broad ‘duh’ light.

On paper Madhoo (bala) plays the kind of gritty cop who wouldn’t hesitate in killing any criminal who comes in her way. Here she is reduced to pleading and moaning about her kidnapped daughter, asking the writer to write in a rescue scene for the kidnapped girl in exchange for money.

This blatant display of corruption is supposed to be okay if one’s family is at risk. What happened to good cop Dilip Kumar who risked his son’s life to get the criminals in Ramesh Sippy’s Shakti? The subversion of elementary ethics seeps right down to the core of the plot. When DGP Asha Pramod commits a heinous crime, scowling cop Vikram tells her to relax and leave it to him to clean up the mess.

A bigger question: who will clean the mess that this film creates? The South filmmakers seem obsessed with police procedurals. But they have to be about more than just self-important cops and carelessly strewn corpses.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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