Knocked out of sanity

Film: Knock Out (Hindi)

Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Irrfan, Kangna Ranaut, Gulshan Grover

Direction: Mani Shankar

Rating: 1/5

It took me a while to muster the courage to watch this film, because some silly sparrow had told me Kangna Ranaut plays a cop in the film. Yesterday I heard a less agonizing piece of news - she plays a TV reporter, and so I watched it finally.

She could have played a cop for all you'd care - it would not matter. Knock Out defies all logic and sense anyway. It's a lousy, unidirectional story adapted from an equally lousy film called Phone Booth. Some nameless guy, played by Sanjay Dutt, is on an apparently serious mission of taking Bachhu Patel (Irrfan) hostage in a phone booth as he takes refuge himself in one of the buildings in the complex (All office-goers at the Magarpatta IT Park, Pune - I truly sympathize with y'all). The film shifts clumsily from one sequence to the other, where a gun-toting and cigarette-smoking shooter bugs the living hell out of Bachhu Patel, and in an attempt to salvage his mission, shoots Bachhu's stalker dead. The entire police force reaches the spot and somehow decides that Bachhu must be the killer - duh! The guy was shot in the back. Bachhu stood in the front. But what the hell! It gets crazier. The police force stands there and simply watches the proceedings instead of taking Bachhu into custody. Why? Because the killer can be dangerous! Double duh! In the meantime, Kangna makes the scene as an irritating TV journalist who always "wants the first bites". She calls herself Needy She-bath-tub (I presume that's supposed to be Nidhi Shrivastava) in an utterly nasal accent that is the only (literally) high point in the film. So Needy She-Bath-Tub and the equally clueless police officers can't for the life of them figure out where this shooter is put up, and Needy She-Bath-Tub keeps getting this inane urge to interview Bachhu Patel even as he struggles to escape the phone booth and the shooter's impeccable aim. After two hours of ordeal, the shooter finally reveals that he is nothing but the true voice of India (Mr. India, anyone?) who wants Bachhu to be a nice little bachhu and stop helping pig-headed ministers like Babuji (Gulshan Grover) pilfer money that's duly every Indian citizen's. Finally, after this high-voltage drama, Bachhu Patel undergoes a tranquil transformation and becomes a national hero, inviting exaggerated gratitude from a squeaking Needy She-Bath-Tub and the rest of the country.

I'm not sure what the director was up to. But I seriously recommend he watches a certain disaster called Dus. It might help him understand that style cannot ever substitute substance. And no, getting your victim to do a sultry dance in the midst of a supposedly tense situation hardly qualifies as cool, as does not an overweight Sanjay Dutt swinging over cable wires like a retired Superman.