Review: Adapted from a Korean film, 'Dhamaka' is highly watchable

Actor Mrunal Thakur as Saumya Mehra Pathak in 'Dhamaka', which dropped on Netflix on Friday, November 19, 2021. (Image: screen grab)

Ousted to the margins of a news conglomerate, Arjun Pathak (Kartik Aaryan) is scruffy and downbeat when we meet him in Ram Madhvani’s Dhamaka. Arjun hosts a current affairs show on a radio channel. Divorce papers clutched in hand, he is about to begin a talk-in about the common man’s taxation woes when something momentous smacks him bang in the middle of his small studio. Arjun is the protagonist in an adaptation of the South Korean thriller The Terror Live, written and directed by Ram Madhvani (Neerja, 2016; Aarya, 2020), which dropped on Netflix on Friday.

One-man show; real time, single-location thriller; parable—all of these descriptors would apply to Dhamaka. It’s shot largely in one location, and camera kinetics are pretty much like the original—breathless and circling back to this one man. The powerful idea behind the film, which is the moral and spiritual corruption of live news monoliths and their disengagement with the truth of social realities, is not new in movies anywhere in the world. In India, examples keep piling on. In streaming fiction, the last live news big shot we watched was another man with a North Indian surname: Sanjeev Mehra, in Amazon Prime Video’s Pataal Lok (2020). Arjun is younger, but similarly egotistic and spotlight-hungry.

Madhvani takes the original template pretty literally. Mumbai’s Bandra-Worli Sea Link replaces Seoul’s Mapo Bridge as a site of terrorist siege—both majestic in their distance from the window of the studio Arjun is in. Both crumble in a blaze. Arjun gets a call from an aggrieved man with a thick rural UP accent threatening to blow up the Sea Link if Arjun does not have a minister come to the studio and apologise to him for the death of three construction workers while slogging hazardously to build Mumbai’s iconic architectural landmark—the target of his terrorist act. Arjun is flummoxed, but he instantly perks up. This is his chance to enter Prime Time once again. All he has to do is get the bomber live on air before calling the authorities. When a second device traps hostages on the bridge, including a news crew headed by his ex-wife, reporter Saumya Mehra Pathak (Mrunal Thakur), Arjun realises that everyone from his news producer Ankita Malaskar (Amrita Subhash) to the anti-terrorist police force headed by Praveen Kamath (Vikas Kumar), and of course, the politician has an agenda in this escalating catastrophe and he is just caught in the middle. While India watches this unfold on new TV, can Arjun really help save the lives at stake? Is this one of those extraordinary circumstances which transforms him from inside out? Will he reunite with his wife?

Madhvani’s ability to craft suspense was evident in Neerja. Here, he already has the template, and in executing the race to the big bang climax, he is absolutely spot on. Dhamaka is a highly watchable thriller—it would be difficult to unplug until you find out how Arjun’s day ends. The music by Vishal Khurana and Prateek Kuhad is a brilliant set-off to the unfolding drama—unlike the hammering our cochlear nerve gets in most Indian thrillers, raising tempo relentlessly as suspense builds up, Khurana and Kuhad’s sounds provide an ebb-and-flow kind of accent to the action, effective in complementing the hurtle to the apocalypse, and somewhat effective also in translating the agony that could be boiling up in Arjun’s head.

The problem that very obviously afflicts the film is that too much is lost in contextual translation. Beyond the bridges, there’s little Indians would relate to in the way the media, politicians and the police engage with each other—the crime branch dude is completely at a loss, fighting and bickering with Arjun’s shockingly callous and cold-hearted boss. The twists turn preposterous by the end. How did a construction worker living in Mumbai’s chawls gather so much military intelligence and technology that he and his partners-in-crime remotely detonate bridges and skyscrapers? Even the man at the heart of all the drama becomes unconvincing towards the end—how could a journalist and a news anchor not predict that this can’t be his ticket back to control TRP wars. The only logic seems to be that he is a TV journalist—the lowest hanging fruit for storytellers is to demonise, pigeon-hole, simplify and dumb down news anchors and TV reporters. Besides TRPs, fame and power, a TV journalist hardly has any agency or surprise in our movies. The time for a full-bodied, complex journalist character is perhaps opportune.

Also read: Kartik Aaryan on 'Dhamaka': "It was one of the most difficult roles of my career"

Madhvani and his cinematographer Manu Anand choose to shoot the film in a matter-of-fact, realistic, real-time way, but the events of the film, and its exaggerated situations are perfect fuel for an allegory or a mellow fantasy—genres in which the point of view of the writer usually translates through the visual language or the sound-visual scheme. The preposterousness is blatant perhaps because of the heavily realistic treatment.

The cast is small and monotone in their performances. Subhash, one of many actors who have burst on to the streaming scene, channels evil in a hard-nosed way. There isn’t a smidgeon of doubt or panic in this character—so unbelievable. Thakur has a benign, good girl-crusader presence, which she competently pulls off; the police officer is a caricature, and Kumar, who was singularly appealing in the role of the nosey cop in Madhvani’s other big OTT outing Aarya (Disney+Hotstar), has little to achieve except stomp in and out of the set (the studio) and look hassled.

In the lead role, Aaryan has the bulk of the challenge to carry this film almost entirely on his own. As an actor, he has a basic, consistent pitch in his performance but he is without any surprises in channeling distress of such proportion. Here’s a character that could reveal much of himself, given the extraordinary circumstance he is in. Through the writing as well as his performance, we know little about Arjun except that he screwed up big time. The shifts between the character’s hopelessness and his resilience are jarring—he uses basic tropes like heavy-handed dialogue delivery to handle the shifts. Still, this is positively a role that’s crucial in his maturing as an actor given the novelty of the format he is working with.

Yes, you will sit on the edge of your seat just a few minutes into Dhamaka; every generalising notion you might hold on to about TV journalism will be validated roaringly. And then, when the final credits roll, you might also wonder: Was it a thunderous, immersive video game you just got out of?