Rocky Handsome (2016)

After producing two full excellent movies (Vicky Donor & Madras Cafe), John Abraham reunites for this third venture with his director of Force, Nishikant Kamat, who is also fresh of a hit from Drishiyam (Hindi version). A remake of the very successful South Korean thriller The Man From Nowhere (2010), this film proves even that even with an official remake tag attached to it a non engaging screenplay is enough to make a film fall like a bunch of dominoes. Having seen the original, I must say the story is pretty average with nothing new to offer, but definitly fun to watch online. Somehow with a crispier script and likable performances director Jeong-beom Lee (the director of TMFN) ended up making the film one of the biggest South Korean cinema. But here, the complicated plot is sluggishly narrated and tackily rendered, the humor forced, the Goa setting convenient and lazy, and the villains just too buffoonish to be menacing. The overall slickness of the original and the sharply edited and beautifully lensed blood-letting are completely missing in the flat Hindi translation. The story follows a hefty pawnshop owner, referred to as Handsome (John Abraham). Plagued by the memory of his dead pregnant wife (Shruti Hassan), the loner’s only friend in the world is a doting young girl next door Naomi (Diya Chalwad), whose mother Anna (Nathalia Kaur) is a pole dancer, drug addict and thief who doesn’t care a hoot for her daughter. Anna and her boy friend set events in motion when they steal a stash of drugs from the club she works at and tries to sell it in the open market.  

When Kevin (Nishikant Kamat), a drug dealer and organ trader who operates various cartels along with his ridiculously psychotic brother, Luke (Teddy Maurya) track down the person who stole their drugs, they kidnap both Anna and Naomi with the aim of reclaiming their loot, selling Anna’s organs on the black market and handing over Naomi to a child trafficker (Suhasini Mulay). Thus inviting a fate worse than death. While you can free download the movie, it starts on a slow pace and then remains dotted with harsh and barbaric and brutal murders, the director tightly etches the second half. It is gripping and the mayhem continues in full force. Till the last scene, it boggles the mind and makes you cringe every now and then. Director Kamat’s ability to turn a good original film into a credible remake was surprise in his last film Drishyam, but with this film it is a solid proof that Bollywood can ruin even the most straightforward of remakes. There are stereotypes galore, deafening background music and lots of blood and gore. There are certain scenes in the film which add to the cringe worthy moment category -the sudden rainfall as John runs to save the child, the manner in which he survives even after being hurled by bullets and takes it out on his own, the way ANC officers send an email to Barack Obama from John’s email ID in order to get his background details – which could have been avoided or toned down to make the film more real. Like his last film, Nishikant brings in tricky ATM withdrawals and draws a sequence reflecting how children are exploited by traffickers in their drug businesses which looks complicated and stretched and even gets confusing to an extent. The focus should have been more on the emotional story and less on action which sadly does not happen.