Cuttputlli Review: Despite few thrilling moments this psychological crime thriller turns out as mediocre remake
Cuttputlli Movie Rating: 2 Stars
Just watched Cuttputlli movie on Disney Plus Hotstar. Let’s focus on the complete details, story, positive/negatives and at last my personal view on this movie.
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Rakul Preet Singh, Chandrachur Singh and Sargun Mehta
Director: Ranjit M. Tewari
Release Date: 2nd September 2022 on Disney Plus Hotstar
Story: The film is a remake of the 2018 Tamil film Ratsasan which revolves round a cop’s mission to track down a child abduction racket in the city.
Arjan Sethi (Akshay Kumar) is a budding filmmaker based in Chandigarh who is obsessed with the horror genre. He wants to make a film on real-life serial killers but fails to find any takers in the Punjabi industry for such a subject. Since his father was a policeman killed during the course of action, he gets a chance to sit in the police exam and passes out as a police sub-inspector.
His brother-in-law Narinder Singh (Chandrachur Singh) and sister Seema (Hrishitaa Bhatt) live in Kasauli along with their young daughter Payal (Renaye Tejani). Narinder helps him get a posting to his own station, where initially the station in-charge, Gudiya Parmar (Sargun Mehta) is unimpressed by him but later takes note of his deduction skills.
A chance meeting with Divya (Rakul Preet Singh) leads to blossoming of romance between the two. Divya is a teacher at Arjan’s niece school and is taking care of her own niece who is a hearing impaired kid. As luck would have it, innocent school girls are being murdered in the same style in Kasauli. The police investigations fail and Arjan comes the closest in understanding the modus operandi of the killer but even he is not able to nab the murderer. Then, one day Payal is kidnapped and ultimately murdered in the same style. Arjan Sethi swears revenge and ultimately nabs the culprit.
Positives
1. Performances
2. Music
3. Cinematography
Negatives
1. Story lacks novelty
2. Direction
3. Climax
4. Length
5. Screenplay
Durgesh Tiwary’s View: When I watched the trailer of this film planned to watch this movie on premiere day because loved the trailer and it is same team who worked on Bell Bottom which I watched in cinemas.
A struggling director turned cop is hot on the trail of a psycho serial killer, who is barbarically killing teenage school girls. Can he nab the killer before he strikes again?
Cuttputlli story is routine as whodunits of this kind have been seen earlier too. Screenplay is fairly well written but it is slow-paced and also lacks novelty of any kind. Direction is just about average. He is unable to create the excitement and thrill one associates with a whodunit. There are only two songs in this film and looks good. The revelation of the killer doesn’t come as a surprise, unlike in the original film. Also, in the original film, the backstory of the murder was established and the cat-and-mouth chase between the cop and the villain went on for sometime, which added to the fear factor. Here, the finale is very hurried. The way the killer’s flashback is executed is very childish. The other major problem is that in many scenes, the United Kingdom has been passed on as Himachal Pradesh, and it doesn’t work. Thanks to the different topography and architecture of the buildings, one can easily make out the difference.
A crime thriller needs a terrific background score. One that doesn’t interfere with the storytelling but heightens the tension in the narrative. The action is natural and the blood and gore are kept to a minimum despite the abject depravity of the killings. Chandan Arora’s edit is crisp but you cannot help wanting to race down to the big reveal in the end. With its cold and damp setting in a nondescript hill town, movie gets the eerie atmospherics of a campy whodunit quite right. It goes to the extremes of a serial killer’s psychopathic exploits keeping in mind the sensibilities of its target audience. Overall, movie has its share of thrilling moments but turns out to be average fare thanks to its weak climax. My view on this movie Time Pass only if you are Akshay Kumar fan.
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