Abhimanyu Dassani's Nikamma is an absolute obsolete film

After a fierce round of promotion and marketing, director-producer Sabbir Kumar’s Nikamma released without any press shows. A sure sign of serious breaches in the product. Not willing to give up easily, I trudged to the nearest theatre in my town to catch the film.

I watched the two-hour twenty-three-minute showreel of utter asininity with an open mind, open mouth not to mention, with twenty-six other bravehearts in the theatre.

So the million ‘dolour’ question: how depressingly bad is Nikamma? The answer, I am afraid—and there is no way one can soften the blow—is this: it is worse than one can imagine in one’s worst nightmare.

What baffles me is, how did the, haha, brains behind this witless family-cum-action hodgepodge think they could get away with it? Did they actually believe audiences would trudge to theatres and pay their hard-earned money to watch this?

From the frenzied opening, when the film’s boyish hero Adi ( Abhimanyu Dassani , likeable but not enough to tolerate this work of worthless thrills) brings a half-dead villain to the hospital, to the triumphant finale when Adi and his bureaucrat Bhabhi rescue her kidnapped husband from sure-death by asphyxiation (better than dying of the boredom that this film tries hard to fob off , but fails miserably), Nikamma is like a heart surgery gone horribly wrong, as the surgeon on duty was a drunken Arjun Reddy .

Does Nikamma even have a director? I know Sabbir Khan’s name appears in the titles for doing the honours. But what was he thinking? Why remake a bad Telugu film Middle Class Abbayi into an even worse Hindi film? Nikamma lacks even the basic grace required to make the core relationship between the Bhabhi and her Devar (so credibly done between Bhumika Chawla and Nani in the Telugu film) look believable.

Shilpa Shetty and Abhimanyu Dassani who play the two key roles look like they barely know each other. Some bonding over workshops before shooting might have helped make them look bonded on screen, though I doubt it.

This is the kind of obstinately obsolete film where the characters behave like puppets on a string mouthing words that sound as unnatural as an app offering quotations of shared wisdom from the past.

Shilpa Shetty’s body language suggests she spends more time in the gym than in the government office where her character is shown scrutinizing files at midnight while her devoted devar stands guard outside her door protecting her from the local goon who dreams of becoming the area’s MLA after eliminating all opposition.

It is heartbreaking to see the extraordinarily gifted veteran Vikram Gokhale playing one of the villain’s victims, out of the picture even before we can welcome the character properly. It is even more heartbreaking for Mayur More of Kota Factory here reduced to playing the hero’s sidekick.

If this is what mainstream Hindi cinema does to talent then there is no hope of redemption.

Nikamma may have worked slightly better if it had restricted its plotting aspirations to the post-interval half where Adi protects his Bhabhi from the local goon. The first half where Adi wooes the town’s over-madeup airhead (newcomer Shirley Setia in a disastrous debut) is the kind of nonsense that may have worked in some primeval era.

Nikamma is so absorbed in the ritual of generating an old-fashioned drama it doesn’t realize how ridiculous the effort looks in today’s day and age. It’s like wearing your school uniform to an old boys’ meet. It just doesn’t fit.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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