Vikram Vedha is occasionally a director’s film. It is frequently one
actor’s film. But above all it’s a screenwriter’s film. Pushkar-Gayathri adapt
their own 2017 Tamil film of the same name; Benazir Ali Fida and Manoj
Muntashir contribute Hindi dialogue. It’s the sort of script where one could
say: shoot what’s on the page and you’re home. It’s an action film with the
plotting of a whodunnit, as twisty and interlocking as The Usual Suspects
was in its day.
From the start, you can sense the presence of a writer pulling the strings.
A special unit of the Lucknow police is about to embark on a raid. Their
leader, Vikram (Saif Ali Khan), greets them one by one on his way to kicking in
the door and starting a gunfight with a group of gangsters. We learn a little
about each through the skirmish and after—two brothers have just paid off their
father’s long-standing loan, another has a fondness for sex workers. This kind
of detailing is good writing period, but even more so when, deep into the film,
the idle talk assumes a significance. Then we realize how little is wasted, how
every joke, every gesture is bait to catch a larger fish.
Vikram and his team are ‘encounter’ cops, summarily executing gangsters in
their efforts to catch the notorious Vedha (Hrithik Roshan), wanted for 16
murders, including a prominent MLA. In a witty sequence (a possible nod to Se7en),
Vedha comes to them, surrendering himself at the station even as preparations
to nab him are in full swing. He won’t speak to the others in the interrogation
room, but when he’s finally across the table from Vikram, Vedha asks if he
would like to hear a story.
This is, of course, a modern version of the Vikram-Betaal fairytales,
stories told by a ghost to a king, all of which end in a moral dilemma. Vedha’s
first story is about how he killed a higher-up when he was just a runner in a
gang. The question he poses Vikram is: did he kill the man who ordered an
attack on his younger brother, or the one who actually did the maiming? Vikram
guesses correctly—he punished the one with the power, not the one carrying out
commands. Vedha is then sprung from jail—one of his lawyers is Vikram’s wife,
Priya (Radhika Apte). But the pattern has been established. Soon there’ll be
another meeting, and another story.
It's been three years since Hrithik Roshan walked across a tarmac,
transformed into a golden god by the ardor in Tiger Shroff’s eyes. His Vedha is
a darker creature, unkempt, bushy beard, with a teasing tone and a casual
brutality. Roshan is magnetic; it’s difficult to take your eyes off him, even
if you’ve seen the excellent Vijay Sethupathi in the Tamil version. He's
entirely at ease, now mocking Vikram, now pushing him to see things more
clearly (Khan is adequate without being imposing). War had felt like a
corner turned for Roshan, and his total command of the screen in Vikram
Vedha bears this out.
One sequence, in the flashback of the first story, is especially beautiful.
In a field with tall grass, Vedha and his men find the kidnappers they’ve been
looking for. ‘Kisi Ki Muskurahaton Pe Ho Nisar’ plays on the radio, and the
action matches its lackadaisical rhythms. Bodies fly in unhurried slow motion.
It’s funny and somewhat abstract, a fight like a dream.
The other action scenes aren’t quite as good, but Pushkar-Gayathri and
cinematographer P.S. Vinod have a useful rule of thumb—if you don’t have
anything special to offer with your choreography or fight skills, keep the
setting pretty. And so we get a sequence with Vedha and Vikram facing off in
the pouring rain, boxed in by giant red containers, the (overenthusiastic)
score veering towards spaghetti western. And a later shootout in an
under-construction building, with the framing taking in the surroundings as
much as the action. Or the climactic scene where the wild fancies of the plot
are grounded by the drab practicality of a factory floor.
Does every bit of cleverness hold up? Maybe not. Priya being Vedha’s lawyer
feels like an attempt to tie every possible thread together. Why don’t Vikram’s
superiors intervene, even when he lets Vedha go free? Why does Abbas (Satyadeep
Mishra), Vikram’s friend and fellow cop, have a change of heart? The central
mystery—why Vedha gives himself up in the first place—holds less interest than
seeing these two men, so good at their jobs that they’ve gotten rather bored of
them, try and trip each other up.
Vikram Vedha chips away at the halo usually handed to the police in
Hindi films. Vikram starts off believing he’s essentially doing the right thing
as an encounter cop (“We are the good guys,” he tells his subordinate). But
with every Vedha story, this conviction is rattled. It ends with cop and
criminal staring each other down, mirror images, separated only by
circumstance. Vikram says early on, “There’s only right or wrong, nothing in
between.” By the end, it’s clear everything is in between, and right or wrong
are just stories we tell to make ourselves feel better.
This piece was published in Mint Lounge.
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