Memory Loss Never Looked So Forgettable.
One might reasonably expect director Rosshan Andrrews to remember why his 2013 Malayalam cracker “Mumbai Police” worked so bloody well. Sadly, this Hindi remake suggests the chap’s suffered his own bout of amnesia. What we get is a rather peculiar beast that swaps psychological sophistication for Bollywood bombast.
Shahid Kapoor throws himself into this with the sort of commitment last seen in Kabir Singh…all brooding intensity and swagger. The lad’s genuinely rather good as Dev, the memory-addled copper piecing together his own investigation. There’s proper conviction here, even when the script goes wobbly on him.
The premise remains rather clever, policeman with amnesia reinvestigating his own case, but Andrrews has gone and bollocked it up with commercial nonsense. Where Mumbai Police was a cracking character study, Deva feels like hero-worship masquerading as a thriller. The tacked-on action sequences, particularly that ghastly prison punch-up finale, reek of focus group interference.
Pooja Hegde does what she can with limited material, whilst Pavail Gulati proves surprisingly solid in the supporting cast.
Visually, it’s slick enough, though it lacks the atmospheric bite of the original.
The real tragedy here isn’t incompetence… it’s creative bottle-job. Andrrews has taken his own sophisticated thriller and transformed it into standard-issue Bollywood fare. It’s rather like watching someone deliberately forget their own masterpiece.
Disappointing doesn’t begin to cover it.
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