RAMAN RAGHAV 2.0 (A)

Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vicky Kaushal, Vipin Sharma, Sobhita Dhulipala
Running time: 140 minutes

It’s a dangerous idea to make a movie as a rejoinder. Many filmmakers have done it in the past and more often than not, history will tell you, they have floundered. Because you are not really making the movie you want. You are making a movie to prove a point. Most reactionary exercises fall flat right at inception because the directors usually are a spent force by the time they want to sing that swansong. But with a filmmaker as talented and as exciting as Anurag Kashyap, the rebuttal is not that redundant.

Last year, Bombay Velvet, with a budget more than that of all his other films combined — and he’s made quite a few starting way back in 2003 with Paanch — crashed at the box office with so much force, all the good work the man had done in the dozen years before that was almost undone on that one black Friday. It was, obviously, time for Anurag Kashyap 2.0, a fresh update to his brand of cinema that we have loved for years — real, dark, violent, relentless.

A serial killer on the loose, a cop overdosing on drugs and women, the underbelly of Mumbai, Nawazuddin Siddiqui with long monologues... it’s that dream exam paper where all the suggestion questions have made their way in. Yet Raghav Raman 2.0 fails. On almost every count. Mostly vacuous, socially flaky, lacking urgency, emotionally bereft, the chapter-wise broken-up film could have worked as a web series but as a two-hour-20-minute movie, it is a laborious trudge which takes you absolutely nowhere.

Nawaz plays Ramanna, a serial killer inspired by the actual serial killer Raman Raghav, who killed 41 people in the mid-1960s. Copycat killers are nothing new — they even made a film called Copycat about the phenomenon — but it’s never quite clear why Ramanna is trying to reprise the adventures of a man who went to jail even before he was born. He is more of a regulation Bollywood psycho talking to god and calling himself “bhagwan ka CCTV camera” and “Yamraj ka doot”.

With a deep long scar on his forehead and with tongue always firmly in cheek, our joker of the piece is actually looking for his Dark Knight. In Assistant Inspector Raghavan (Vicky Kaushal) Ramanna finds his Raghav. Just like Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price had found Bruce Willis’s David Dunn in Shyamalan’s Unbreakable: “We’re on the same curve.” And much later in Nolan’s second film of The Batman Trilogy: “You complete me,” the Clown Prince had told the Caped Crusader.

What’s Ramanna’s explanation? Just like he kills people for kicks, in Raghavan he believes he’s found his “soulmate” who doesn’t need a reason to murder another person. That the latter’s actions are always under the influence of drugs doesn’t really help Ramanna’s warped logic. The writers (Kashyap and Vasan Bala) give one Daddy issues and the other Maa issues and they believe they got it covered.

But all that psycho chatter doesn’t make any point. Mentioning Syria and playing a TV show about violence against women can’t add depth and social awareness to a film which is more interested in celebrating sadomasochism. 

Also, there’s nothing more sad than watching a Nawaz performance and feeling that you have seen this before. He’s undoubtedly good — the menacing smile, the shifting eyes, the craggy speech — but it’s nothing you haven’t seen in Wasseypur or Badlapur. It’s as if Nawaz was written in the script and there was no effort to create a fresh new character.

Vicky Kaushal, who was so impressive in Masaan, is effective here as the twisted cop living in the moment. But it’s again an underwritten role and there is no emotional catharsis at any point of time. Raghavan remains just a faulty concept in Ramanna’s mind and the film.

The background score by Ram Sampath, using trance, fusion and mouth percussion, is a mixed bag, working fine in a few scenes and overdoing it in others. Cinematographer Jay Oza creates many a haunting image, using Nawaz’s eyes to the optimum.

It’s when you want to tell the world that you are the same guy, the world doesn’t want that older you anymore. Because the curve has changed. And rather than rebut, perhaps Kashyap needs to reboot. Maybe he already has. His short film in the international anthology project Madly, which won Radhika Apte the best actress award  at Tribeca, is said to be the best thing he’s made in a long time. We’ll wait for AK 3.0.

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