What was narcotics squad officer Sumair thinking when he decided to hold on to a bag of blow that didn’t belong to him? After the actual owner of the goods kidnaps Sumair’s son, he has plenty of time to reflect on his actions.
The crooked cop (Shahid Kapoor) and his grumpy son Atharva (Sartaj Kakkar) have a tense relationship. Here is an opportunity for Sumair to redeem himself. Plus, there is money to be made. The hotel where drug dealer Sikander (Ronit Roy Bose) awaits Sumair and his stash is, in fact, hosting a big fat Indian wedding.
Sumair’s decision to put the squeeze on Sikandar leads to a series of hospitality nightmares. (That soup you ordered? It might bear the flavour of a melted gun.) Pursued by his colleagues Sameer (Rajeev Khandelwal) and Aditi (Diana Penty) as well as Sikandar’s posse, Sumair is in for a sleepless night as he tries to rescue his son.
Bloody Daddy, Ali Abbas Zafar’s Hindi-language remake of the French production Nuit Blanche (2011), is being streamed for free on JioCinema. Zafar and co-writer Aditya Basu tweak the source material to suit Indian sensibilities while retaining the original’s amoral approach and seriocomic tone. Most of the laughs are generated by the banter between Sikandar and Hamid (Sanjay Kapoor), the intended buyer of the stolen drugs, but these humorous interludes are few and far between.
There’s plenty of cocaine floating around, but not enough speed. The plot is still being set up nearly halfway through, leaving us enough time to marvel at costume designer Anshu Jain’s impeccable styling and Marcin Laskawiec’s sexy, sleek cinematography. Just like Sumair makes up things as he goes along, the film darts from momentum to slumps, fast-paced action to lengthy preludes to the next round of bone-crunching promised by the title.
A committed cast keeps a strictly serviceable film in play. Shahid Kapoor deftly channels some of the energy of his character Charlie from Kaminey and a great deal of Kabir Singh from the film of the same name. Ronit Roy Bose and Sanjay Kapoor have a blast, even though their characters are too slow on the uptake to be taken seriously as ruthless drug lords or even regular businessmen. Perhaps it’s all that product in the air. Mayhem breaks out in parts of the hotel but everyone else simply carries on.
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