The Mumbai underworld has seemingly dissolved into the ether. Dawood Ibrahim does not live there anymore. Chhota Rajan and Abu Salem are in prison. What then of the gangster movie, a genre that has riveted Hindi filmmakers for close to three decades? Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy proposes an alternative.
In Kennedy, the hoodlums are now the Mumbai police. When it comes to extortion, blackmailing and law-breaking, the city’s designated protectors – hyperbolically self-described as “second only to Scotland Yard” – lead the pack , Kennedy gutsily suggests.
Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and finally out on ZEE5, Kennedy unfolds during the Covid pandemic. Masks play an important role in a plot inspired by the Antilla bomb scare incident from 2021: in an instance of fact being stranger than fiction, a Mumbai police unit planted a car with explosive material near businessman Mukesh Ambani’s mansion for reasons that remain murky.
In Kashyap’s screenplay, the chief driver of events is an assassin posing as a chauffeur for a car rental service. Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat) used to be a cop but is now an unofficial hitman for police commissioner Rasheed Khan (Mohit Takalkar).
The dead-eyed Indian cousin of Travis Bickle robotically dispenses lead on Rasheed’s orders. Along the way, Uday keeps running into Charlie (Sunny Leone), an enigmatic fixer with a drinking habit and a peculiar giggle.
The film’s title, while referring to Uday’s alias, invokes conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of American President John F Kennedy. The plotting has the whiff of crime dramas in which conscientious individuals become vigilantes, only to realise that they are pawns in a larger political game. Characters scheme away in bars or the backseats of cars.
Kennedy goes further than its moralistic predecessors. Uday’s ticking psychosis makes him the perfect hired gun for Rasheed and his deputy Kale (Shrikant Yadav). There are crores at stake for Rasheed and his grubby-handed posse, which explains the outlandish plan to rattle a gazillionaire.
It sounds bizarre and it plays out in a hallucinatory manner too. Kashyap and cinematographer Sylvester Fonseca creatively imagine Mumbai as a subterranean zone of depopulated streets and neon. In this netherworld, the shadows are as long as the nights, relationships are transactional and nearly everybody is deranged.
The unsettling mood that the 146-minute Kennedy has sedulously built up is interrupted Kashyap’s tendency to lose his train of thought after a gripping set-up as well as his lean towards bloat. Some of the on-the-nose dialogue doesn’t fit a movie that works better in an allusive register.
Kashyap also ties himself up in knots by going too far in explaining Rasheed’s grand plan. What Kennedy unerringly achieves is a withering portrait of Mumbai as the capital of anomie, in which greed has reached stratospheric proportions and values have no meaning.
Jarring classical music is plastered over scenes of slaughter, while club songs performed by indie artists Amir Aziz and Boyblanck hold forth on generalised moral turpitude. The enervating melodrama surrounding Uday’s domestic life is from another movie altogether.
Mohit Takalkar’s theatrical hamming weirdly complements Rahul Bhat’s heavily underlined stoicism. Bhat looks the part of a menace to society and himself, but there’s a monotony to the gravelly-voiced Uday.
The movie’s biggest surprise is an excellent Sunny Leone, in her first real performance. Leone’s Charlie personifies Kennedy’s overall uncanniness. It’s never quite clear what Charlie is up to, which makes her a perfect fit in Kashyap’s out-of-control universe.
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