If you’ve been around over the past few months, you may have heard a story or ten about how Bollywood has lost ground to the more established South Asian film industry. Given the phenomenal success of RRR and KGF, it might not be a complete misreading of the situation, but there have also been a few apocalyptic articles proclaiming the “death of Bollywood.”
One is almost tempted to implore people to hold off on making such hasty decisions as someone who frequently attends Hindi film screenings (and makes an attempt to keep up with good Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam films).
And just when one is rooting for Bollywood’s future, a movie comes along that makes you wonder if it’s really worth it. One such movie is The First Case, a hit from Sailesh Kolanu.
Hit: The First Case, based on Kolanu’s 2020 Telugu film of the same name, features talented performers Rajkummar Rao and Sanya Malhotra who succumb to the T-Series formula and give what is likely their worst performances to date. The more that Kolanu’s picture exposes itself, the more we realize how steeped in clichés it is despite its initial pretense of being a cop procedural.
Police officer Vikram (Rajkummar Rao) has a “history.” Really though this is a review and not even a script, I’m not sure if I should grumble at the final sentence. Doesn’t this sentence get old for screenwriters?
What other way is there to write about a “cop with a past”? One who, as a result of unresolved trauma, has developed some type of phobia, is sensitive to specific images and spends his free time in his living room sipping whiskey from a dusty glass and thinking back on his ex-lover.
Neha (Sanya Malhotra), an actor who can survive horrors like Meenakshi Sundareshwar, is given the responsibility of making flashback appearances when Vikram drinks whiskey and a song by Ankit Tiwari or Arijit Singh plays in the background. the ideal period. When T-Series did not create an infinite number of music videos with a similar aesthetic to satisfy India’s Jilted Lovers Inc.
Due to an incident that is not entirely clear, Vikram has PTSD. He witnessed a young woman being burned alive in front of him by masked men. Since then, he has been terrified of fire. Vikram continues to look into crimes despite being urged to stop working as an active police officer since doing so causes him to experience panic episodes.
He is the department’s blue-eyed kid, as in other movies of this type, and his supervisor (Dalip Tahil) calls him “My Boy!” He has excellent instincts, which makes other police officers envious, notably one man named Akshay (Jatin Goswami), who is constantly trying to outdo Vikram.
Neha works in a crime laboratory that resembles Dr. Salunkhe from C.I.D. One day, while Vikram is away due to his failing health, she inexplicably vanishes from her residence. Another little girl had vanished a few months before Neha’s disappearance. When Vikram is called back to look into the latter case, he realizes that the two cases are connected.
In the wake of the MeToo movement, crimes against women have given rise to an entirely new genre of movies and television shows, like The Invisible Man (2020) and the Netflix series Unbelievable (2019).
There is a greater degree of empathy for survivors, a more intense immersion in their trauma, and a realization of how cruel it is for one gender to abuse another. Hit: The First Case focuses solely on the man’s pain rather than acknowledging the evolution of its genre. How a man feels when he discovers a woman’s body that has been killed or brutalized. As a result, the cases serve as a tool for his own atonement.
Kolanu’s picture only succeeds when he seeks to convey how tedious routine investigation can be. And how even the most ‘regular’ questions reveal answers that have always been there.
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Rajkummar Rao, who currently has one of Hindi cinema’s most credible erratic screams, ends up sounding and looking like a stand-in for an Aditya Roy Kapur part. On the other hand, Sanya Malhotra rarely gets off on the wrong foot and appears to live in a Shraddha Kapoor realm.
One of the film’s funniest scenes features Dalip Tahil’s commissioner reprimanding figures like a principal. I nearly expected him to continue, “Is this a classroom or a fish market?” after shouting “Juveniles!” in one scene.I was horrified to see Milind Gunaji’s earnest expression as the film chases its own tail at the conclusion (thanks to “Twists!”).
He was a serious acting force in the 1990s, appearing in both alternative films like Virasat and Zor and mainstream fares like Droh Kaal and Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa. However, he is now being compelled to play a variety of characters.
It almost perfectly depicts the decline in our films over the past 25 years. Bollywood is currently in such a condition of creative bankruptcy that in addition to producing poor movies every week, we are also “remaking” subpar movies from the South.
