Review | The Hindi 'Drishyam 2' rests on OG Jeethu Joseph’s heavy plot-meistering

A still from the film.

Abhishek Pathak’s remake of Drishyam 2, the Malayalam sequel to Drishyam (2015),  has an elaborately-mapped plot — and little else. Both the original and the Hindi version aren’t brain workouts much, which makes it suitably accessible for a wider audience. The screenplay by Aamil Keeyan Khan and Pathak is largely faithful to the original Malayalam by Jeethu Joseph, and editor Sandeep Francis maintains a tight pace, while leaving a small window for psychological layers. Like the first, it is ingenuous in the way the writing subverts a whodunit into a “how-to-undo-it” thriller.

Seven years after Vijay Salgaonkar, a cable TV owner in Goa, burly family man with the swag of a bodyguard (in other words, Ajay Devgn being himself), buried the body of a young man his daughter killed at their family home and saved his family from the law, he is living it up. He owns a multiplex and is at work to be a film producer. He is in talks with a Dubai-based writer (Saurabh Shukla) to make his first film. He drives an SUV. His wife Nandini (Shriya Saran) hasn’t aged even a sliver, and the couple is still awkwardly clutching at straws for a semblance of a chemistry. Nandini is still worried the past will catch up on them. The two daughters are grown up; the elder suffers from episodes of trauma-induced fits. Vijay has an aura that best translates to bodyguard-angel rather than father and husband. He is still shrewd and without prescience, and his character’s bland moral fibre — family before self — is tested to the extreme when former IG of Goa police Meera Deshmukh (Tabu) whose son Vijay’s daughter killed seven years ago, and her husband Mahesh (Rajat Kapoor) are back in Goa. With a new IG ruling the Goa police force Tarun Ahlawat (Akshaye Khanna as himself or what he has been in every role he has ever played), the case reopens and Vijay now has to exert every cell of his brain to save his family another time.

To give away more will be to give away the twisty climax; the screenplay’s build-up with people and events in Vijay’s life is clever without cerebral demands.

In the Malayalam version, with a gifted actor like Mohanlal who looks so much more the Everyman part than Devgn at the centre, the psychological and moral layers that is inherent in the story — a simplified Dostoyevskian foundation of the various implications of crime and punishment — get a convenient short shrift. Devgn is all brawn and too ever to be the unputdownable hero. His supposed nemesis Khanna has some great dialogues, but is trapped in his own broody persona. A maverick police officer is a disruptor of the system, and solves his cases without taking the beaten route; Tarun Ahlawat just about manages a menacing I-know-it-all glance in every other scene. Tabu’s role is much shorter, but she manages to swallow the two big guys with her screen presence and acting.

The climactic twist in Drishyam 2 is worth the 148-minute running length despite a few extremely forced plot points. Drishyam 3 has already been officially green-lit — and only a radical rethinking of the crime at the centre and its expansive impact on the lives of those who are embroiled can keep the Drishyam saga alight. The directors and writers, like the characters in the film, would need to see anew or from an original angle.

Drishyam 2 released in theatres on November 18.