There are flawed protagonists. And then there are problematic men masquerading as heroes. Dev Ambre aka Deva belongs to the latter category. Deva is a trigger-happy Mumbai cop whose designation is disproportionate to the body count he has notched up. Deva has severe anger issues, conveniently notched down to him being a rebel. He doesn’t think twice before sticking the barrel of a gun into the mouth of a woman who is not a criminal by any measure.
Dev is a huge proponent of police brutality, but gets away with it every time. No one can say ‘no’ to him. For that would mean that person’s body parts could be in real danger of being distanced from his body. When Dev asks his girlfriend Diya (Pooja Hegde) what she likes about him, she replies with: ‘Besides your arrogance, your grumpy face and your huge anger issues, I like the fact that you have a child in you.’
Shahid Kapoor has played Deva before. In a film called Kabir Singh. He is angsty. He beats up people randomly. He drinks all hours of the day. He has smoke billowing around him all the time. He rides a bike, but doesn’t have the chartbuster music of Kabir Singh as a saving grace. He doesn’t treat women — as has been mentioned earlier in this review — well. And, of course, like in Kabir Singh, he is the ‘hero’.
Deva has also been Deva before. In a film called Mumbai Police, with director Rosshan Andrrews remaking his own Malayalam film as his Bollywood debut. It is a lazy remake, with the filmmaker hardly making an effort to update or upgrade the Hindi version, which arrives 12 years after the original that had Prithviraj Sukumaran as its protagonist.
Playing out like the typical masala action films that one has seen commercial Bollywood churn out in assembly-line fashion over the last few decades, Deva has cops and criminals jostling for space. Women, like in Kabir Singh, hardly have much to do. They aren’t slapped around or gaslighted like in that film, but their presence is reduced to a footnote here.
The first half of Deva — the film, to warn you at the outset, is an interminable 156 minutes long — is especially taxing on all the senses. Dev swaggers around on screen in whack, thwack, boom, bang, repeat mode. He mouths done-to-death lines like: “Mumbai tere baap ka nahin hain... Mumbai police ki hain.”
The story is as old as Bollywood itself. Dev, aided by fellow cop Rohan (Pavail Gulatie), is on the heels of a dreaded gangster, but they suspect that someone inside the force is helping him. That is further reiterated by the number of times Pooja Hegde, playing a journalist, is made to say the word ‘mole’. She is given little else to say or do in this testosterone-dominated fest.
A murder/ assassination in broad daylight of a man in uniform makes the mission personal for Dev. But just as he gets within sniffing distance of the truth, he finds himself caught in extraordinary (but not for Bollywood) circumstances.
To be fair, the second half of Deva is better. The film metamorphoses from a mindless action caper to a semi-thrilling police procedural with a whodunit feel. Shahid looks confused — but that suits his part in Half Two where he becomes ‘Dev B’ from ‘Dev A’ (give us Dev.D over either any day). The twist towards the end — if you haven’t watched the Malayalam original — definitely packs a punch, but it is preceded by so much banality and unnecessarily mounted violence that it hardly makes amends.
Director Andrrews has said that Deva is his homage of sorts to Parinda, evoking the same emotions that he felt when he watched the Vidhu Vinod Chopra-directed ’80s classic for the first time. There are similarities — a cop being shot dead in broad daylight, multiple shots of pigeons fluttering, an almost dystopian lens on Mumbai — but his film is not a patch on Parinda. Which is a pity because Deva did start off with promise — Shahid dancing in the middle of a busy street with Amitabh Bachchan’s famous dialogue from Don playing and a mural of the superstar in Deewaar forming the backdrop. From then on, it is all downhill.