As far as teasers and titles go, to suggest that Pankaj Tripathi, so revered for his calm eloquence and poise, would play someone called ‘Kadak Singh’ is a high-stakes promise that a filmmaker must live up to or at least try and stay true to. It’s precisely where this film of muted tones, garbled messaging, askew symmetry and ineffective performances falters. To that highly strung promise of asking one of the country’s best actors to play something that suggests tension, electricity maybe even grim violence, this strangely listless film delivers none of it. Zee5’s Kadak Singh is a psychological thriller without the psychology or the thrill. More criminal, however, is its wastage of a fine actor and a title that itself spells something more intense, tragicomic or at least vigorous.
Pankaj Tripathi is AK Srivastava, a financial investigator attached with a national agency. Srivastava is in the hospital after having tried to commit suicide inside his own office. He has lived, but his memory hasn’t. His daughter, played by the Sanjana Sanghi and a junior protégé played by Paresh Pahuja bring him up to speed and uncover, in the process, a world of hurt, lies and foul play. It’s not a terrible premise to begin with except it is executed with the banal imprecision of a tin drum hurtling down whatever side of the hillslope it hits first. Kadak Singh is what Srivastava’s colleagues call him for his discipline and rigour but none of its meritocracy translates to the texture of a film that is strangely listless.
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Srivastava must piece together his life from everything he is being told. He is assisted in this task by his family – and the one nurse taking care of him – whom he suspects, without any conviction whatsoever. It’s almost as if the creators had no brief to offer the actor, who plays the officer, neither with nervy suspicion nor dire comeback energy. He perpetually looks and sounds bemused, without the slightest hint of desperation. The fact that Tripathi plays most of this role – except in the flashbacks – from the bed of a hospital is evidence that the creators wish to entrust him with a lot of responsibility. Most of it, however, without offering him meat to chew into or a layered life worthwhile the tears and anxiety it would takes to unpeel.
Directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, Kadak Singh is everything it’s title isn’t. It’s neither crisp, nor urgent. At one point a junior officer tells Srivastava’s daughter, “sir is so regimental he wouldn’t even leave a suicide note incomplete.” There is a thin line between the fleshing of a character and the disfiguration of a trope. This is stretching that line way too thin. The righteous, investigative officer here is interpreted as a slick, tightly-wrapped personality with a somewhat grey backdrop of familial and parental problems. None of which make the film any stronger, or make us care for the man any better. The daughter, the protégé, the mistress, the nurse are all interesting tools, wasted in this vague, uninteresting exercise of just talking a victim through it. Cinema has to do better or at least enough to make you want to see what you cannot.
This isn’t the first time Pankaj Tripathi has been wasted in a role that simply doesn’t come with the armrest of good writing to deliver his usual, self-assured performance from. The plot is thin, with barely any thrill, stakes or interesting characters to write about. So much so, you can’t even invest in discovering the causality of a suicide attempt. Emotion should be easy to manipulate in the face of trauma and grief, and yet a person on a hospital bed, apparently on the brink of breaking down, can’t inspire empathy or intrigue. He wakes up in denial and rather than be fascinated by his own life story receives it with the nonchalance of someone who neither knows the character he is supposed to play or the life he is supposed to reclaim.
There is probably a parallel universe where a title like Kadak Singh would yield either a grim, true crime drama or a loud, pulpy thriller that uses a master actor’s gift of the gab. Tripathi has played intense roles in films like Gurgaon and shows like Mirzapur and here there was maybe the opportunity to find him this new configuration of vocabulary and tone. Ask him to maybe become more than the soft-talking, grounded, flawless human he comes across as. Instead, Kadak Singh is more of a Tripathi type than he is a character conceived through imagination. It’s okay to subvert expectation, cast against type and not deliver. It’s another to not even live up to the tenacity or crunchiness of your title, from the first minute onwards.
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