Director: Devang Bhavsar
Writers: Devang Bhavsar, Abbas Dalal, Hussain Dalal
Cast: Vikrant Massey, Sunil Grover, Mouni Roy, Anant Joshi, Ruhani Sharma, Jisshu Sengupta, Saurabh Ghadge, Karan Sonawane, Chhaya Kadam
Duration: 130 mins
Streaming on: JioCinema
Blackout stars Vikrant Massey, but it unfolds more like a Kunal Kemmu crime caper gone wrong. “Gone Wrong” is an interesting phrase in this context. Things going wrong is, as this genre argues, the entire point of such movies. Comedy of errors, some call it. The template is just that: Everything goes wrong for an ordinary guy over the course of one night. If the story feels crowded and ridiculous, the film can claim it’s deliberate. Chaos is the language; the worse it gets, the better it apparently is. Blackout has all that intersecting noise: A city-wide blackout, an accident, a minivan full of gold, a dead body to bury, a poetry-spouting drunkard, two broke influencers, one random damsel, a Bengali detective, an ex-MLA, a conspiracy, a brooding gangster, a shootout, a treacherous spouse. But the film’s going-wrong is what goes wrong, if you get my drift. If you don’t, well, I’ll just say it’s deliberate.
The stylized intros, unimaginative (Anil Kapoor) voice-over, non-linear gimmicks, the trying-too-hard dialogue, criss-crossing tracks, Bollywood needle drops, spoofy treatment – 130 minutes is 45 too many for a film like this. A character lip-syncing the Baadshah (1999) title song does not a Baadshah make. (Though the use of ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ in a scene where bullets are pumped into the sky makes for the film’s best gag).
