Director: Ali Abbas Zafar
Writers: Ali Abbas Zafar, Aditya Basu, Siddharth-Garima
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Ronit Bose Roy, Rajeev Khandelwal, Diana Penty, Sartaaj Kakkar, Sanjay Kapoor, Vivaan Bhathena, Zeishan Quadri, Mukesh Bhatt
So much of our viewing experience is informed by how we choose to approach a film. Nobody enters the theatre with a blank slate. No matter what the rulebooks say, it’s our inherent biases that shape the subjectivity of art. Our eventual engagement with a film stems from a starting point of either cynicism or nervous hope. The scale is tilted by nature. Hope leaves us more vulnerable to disappointment. But the more common slant for mainstream Hindi cinema involves going in with no (or negative) expectations. When that happens, there’s the chance of getting ‘pleasantly surprised’ if the movie is not terrible. This reaction is a double-edged sword, too, because there’s also the chance of misinterpreting the surprise as genuine enjoyment.
It’s a loaded and fraught journey, and one that I almost always traverse during an Ali Abbas Zafar title. I go in cold, get blindsided by the slickness, become a believer, start rooting for the film or show, overstate its merits, and end up disappointed when it doesn’t satiate my newfound joy. I then come out confused about my overall impression: Was it almost good? Or was it almost a copout for wasting its initial promise? Bloody Daddy – after Jogi (2022), Tandav (2021), Bharat (2019) and Sultan (2016) – is the latest addition to this specific canon of “almost” entertainment. It falls agonizingly short of being a blast, but also comes agonizingly close to being a slog. A remake of the 2011 French-language action thriller Sleepless Night, Bloody Daddy revolves around an irate NCB (Narcotics Control Bureau) officer unleashing one night of havoc in a 7-star hotel of the kingpin who’s kidnapped his son. But he’s not exactly a hero.
The film opens with the officer, Sumair (Shahid Kapoor), robbing – as opposed to busting – a lucrative cocaine shipment at Delhi’s Connaught Place. Unfortunately for him, it belongs to Sikandar (Ronit Bose Roy), the owner of a lush Gurugram hotel who wastes no time in abducting Sumair’s son (Sartaaj Kakkar) and demanding the cocaine back in exchange for the boy’s life. Sumair promptly arrives, but hides the duffel bag in the ventilation shaft of the men’s restroom as a (not so bright) negotiating tool. All hell breaks loose when the bag disappears and tension mounts, thanks to the other characters of the story: Sumair’s honest colleague (Diana Penty), his dishonest colleague (Zeishan Quadri), his corrupt boss (a scene-stealing Rajeev Khandelwal), Sikandar’s nefarious client (Sanjay Kapoor), and Sikandar’s beefy brother (Vivaan Bhatena).
