Kennedy Movie Review: Anurag Kashyap’s latest outing, Kennedy, which was part of the ongoing Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, comes 11 years after his Gangs of Wasseypur (in two parts). But for this work and to a large extent, Black Friday, Kashyap, has given us largely disappointing cinema.
Also part of the Cannes Film Festival last May, Kennedy is a crime thriller, and like most of the director’s movies, his latest too has an unmistakable Quentin Tarantino feel, especially the scenes of murder and bloodshed. Kashyap’s and Tarantino’s killers are cold blooded, ruthless and terribly heartless. They stab and shoot with senseless madness. But while Tarantino’s criminals have had their characters wonderfully developed, Kashyap’s protagonist, Kennedy / Uday (Rahul Bhat), comes as a uni-dimensional guy.
The plot itself is convoluted and the performances are shoddy to say the least. It is like a long jigsaw puzzle, but while we can solve it, Kashyap’s Kennedy begs for answers. It takes a good while before we find out why Kennedy turns from a cop to a cold-blooded murderer. And there are other questions which are left hanging.
The movie begins with a quote from poet Wordsworth: “We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” This hardly seems apt for the narrative, and the opposite appears to be happening. Uday/Kennedy is a policeman, who is given up as dead by even his family, and he operates in the shadows as a contract killer. He never sleeps, and with a blank expression goes about his heinous job.
Uday’s former boss, police commissioner Rasheed (Mohit Takalkar), uses him to carry out dirty work. But Uday also has his own revenge angle, and into all this fits a stiff Sunny Leone, who essays a Canadian female fatale, Charlie. The film becomes quite a mis-mash of inanity. Amid all this, Kennedy never comes off as believable. And Kashyap’s work, which runs for 143 minutes, fails to make its point.
