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D-day (U/a)
Director: Nikhil Advani
Cast: Rishi Kapoor, Irrfan, Arjun Rampal, Huma Qureshi, Shruti Haasan
Running time: 155 minutes
Aweek after Bhaag Milkha Bhaag turned back time to celebrate a national hero, Nikhil Advani cooks up a plot to catch a national villain. And while everyone in last Friday’s film had real names, this one shies away from such formalities. After all, you can’t ask Dawood Ibrahim to endorse a film about his capture and travel with the team for music launches and premieres!
But then again, just because you don’t take his name doesn’t make Iqbal Seth (Rishi Kapoor) any less of a Dawood. Puzo and Coppola never used the word ‘mafia’; that didn’t make Godfather a Barjatya family entertainer. After all, the man here wears pink shades and the film’s called D-Day!
As long as the film tries to keep this code of compromised reality intact, it is a terrific roller-coaster ride. Just that in that last act when the wish fulfilment serum becomes a little too strong, D-Day becomes a generic action thriller with forced twists and turns till the finishing line. And by the time the D-Man gushes about his prospective trysts with Rajdeep Sardesai and Arnab Goswami, you don’t know whether to laugh with or laugh at the film.
But that’s just a fraction of what is largely a high-octane smart and stylish spy thriller (written by Advani with Suresh Nair and Ritesh Shah) about a four-member RAW team from India trying to nab the most wanted man from Pakistan. There’s the soldier Rudra (Arjun Rampal), the planner Wali (Irrfan), the bomb expert Zoya (Huma Qureshi) and the driver Aslam (Akash Dahiya).
What could have been a better day to strike but on Iqbal Seth’s son’s nikaah at a star hotel in Karachi. ISI warns the big daddy but he’s had enough of hide and seek. “Darr ka dukaan khula hai, darr jaaoon toh dukaan bandh ho jaayegi!” The RAW team’s Operation Goldman goes perfectly till a moment of indecision costs them very dearly. That would mean India disowning its heroes and the fab four having to script their own D-tale.
Now this is no Zero Dark Thirty where the protagonist has no personal life. Our men have women to take care of –– Wali has a Pakistani wife (Shriswara) and child and Rudra is more than just physical with the sex worker (Shruti Haasan) he returns to every night. Even Zoya is negotiating her relationship with a man (voice of Rajkumar Yadav) back home.
Despite these emotional pullbacks, D-Day never takes a breather in the first two hours, keeping you on the edge of your seat. Gritty camerawork (Tushar Kanti Roy), fast cuts (Aarif Sheikh and Unni Krishnan), top-notch action choreography (Tom Struthers and John Street) and a pulsating background score (Tubby) create a novel yet thoroughly entertaining experience. Even the songs (Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy) are so imaginatively picturised they seep into the narrative effortlessly.
But what really makes the film tick are the performances. From the leads to the cameos, every actor is on song here. Irrfan again is the pick of the lot with every stare conveying the struggle between the man of the house and the man of the nation. After Rock On!! and Raajneeti, Arjun continues to wow; seething with deep-seated anger and simmering with restrained passion. His scenes and songs with Shruti Haasan are as much the heart of the film as Irrfan’s scenes with his wife and son. Shriswara making her debut as Irrfan’s wife is brilliant; you’ll see a lot more of her. Chandan Roy Sanyal as D-bhanja is appropriately mad. It is Rishi Kapoor’s performance which can divide the house. He is very good but he remains Rishi Kapoor and gives a comic overtone to the character which sometimes dilutes the intensity of the proceedings.
Kathryn Bigelow was ready to shoot a film on the unsuccessful efforts to track down Osama bin Laden when he was actually killed in Abbottabad and she had to change the script. Nikhil Advani has actually gone ahead and filmed the ultimate Indian fantasy of capturing the man who’s killed thousands of our innocent countrymen over the last couple of decades. It is this overriding sense of what-if jingoistic jubilation that carries the film through.
Catch D-Day; maybe this is the closest we’ll ever get to catching the D-Dude.
