Director: Vishal Bhardwaj
Actors: Shahid Kapoor, Triptii Dimri
Rating: 3 stars
For the most part, O’Romeo feels like two separate films.
One, starring Shahid Kapoor, with self-indulgent action set-pieces, and extended ‘item’ numbers, plus crackling dance moves.
The other, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, carrying the story forward with curious cool-cat characters, mock-ironic one-liners, and the general Vishal-vibe to it all.
For the former, consider the opening sequence of a hammer-sickle blood-fest inside Mumbai’s Liberty Cinema that’s supposed to set the film’s tone (it doesn’t).
For the latter, gawk and cackle at the classical singer, cop Pathare (Rahul Deshpande), expressing his memos through musical notes!
Once you reconcile yourself to this bipolar nature/order of entertainment, onscreen — it becomes easier to connect and enjoy the film for its own worth. Albeit bloated enough, hence, with a running time of 178.41 minutes, to be precise.
And when exactly, in that timeline, does that switch in your brain occur?
Certainly not over the introductory 30-40 minutes, when there are so many songs, as badly spaced, they seem like loo-breaks — that you’d rather hear as YouTube playlist for a soundtrack, separately.
Which also makes O’Romeo a fair example of a movie that lowers the expectations from the get go. And that for whatever happens from thereon feels progressively better, along the way.
It’s also because backstories for the central plot unravel over time.
They do answer key questions popping in your head, sufficiently. Some amount of patience is key. Assume, always, the killings take place first. They’re explained only much later.
To begin with, it’s pretty lit that for a full-on revenge drama titled after the male protagonist — the one actually avenging crimes from her past is the female lead (strikingly serene, Triptii Dimri).
She lost her childhood sweetheart and husband (Vikrant Massey) to a don (Avinash Tiwary; an absolute beast), who was his employer. On her hit-list are also cops.
The mob often operated in cahoots with Mumbai police. The film’s primarily set in 1995, post-Bombay blasts (1993), and Babri masjid demolition (1992), when the underworld had evidently been partitioned over religion.
At the other end, equally, is an Intelligence Bureau officer (Nana Patekar; killing it, as usual, with his inimitable swag) determined to clean up the gangland from within.
Just do that roll call again: Besides Nana, Vikrant, Avinash, even conventional eye-candies for side-bars, namely Tamannaah Bhatia, Disha Patani — all of whom play lead roles, usually.
What strikes you is their willingness to participate in a film that wholly ups its playing field as a result.
At the centre-forward, of course, is Shahid. Playing Nana’s brutal hit-man, he seems all too aware that he has to deliver a hit pic, being the mean-machine, alongside. You can sense him giving it his all.
This trigger-happy character — with a den in the dockyard, George Michael earring, swigging whiskey from a rifle-shaped bottle — seems quite in line with enraged, antsy, antagonist-types being adored as movie heroes, lately (Animal, Dhurandhar, etc).
For a second, I felt Shahid had modelled his hair-beard on Allu Arjun (Pushpa).
Speaking of which, hard to tell, why his character, originally, Hussain ‘Ustara’ (Razor), is named Arjun Ustara, instead. Still, there’s a star in Ustara!
He’s based on a true story by crime journalist S Hussain Zaidi in the anthology, Mafia Queens of Mumbai (authored with Jane Borges).
I’ve anyway saved that 60-page chapter, Femme Fatale, to read after the film. Just as I did with the chapter, The Matriarch of Kamathipura, from the same book, that Sanjay Leela Bhansali based his super-hit mob-opera Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) on.
While real-life text elevates fiction, of course, the book will be nothing like the film.
The brief behind which, foremost, appears to be the audience wants “scale” at the cinema — down to the plaza de toros, for a bull-fight, with the main villain (Avinash) as the matador in Spain!
Yet, it’s the more intimate scenes, even that action sequence set inside the Mumbai local train, that feel cult like Kaminey (2009)!
Which was Shahid’s first collab with writer-director-composer-producer Vishal Bhardwaj. They stepped out together twice after (Haider, Rangoon).
Whatever you may think of those films, or any other by Vishal — rare auteur marrying middle-of-the-road to the mainstream (this is his most patently ‘commercial’ work yet) — what you can’t deny is the audacity of the ambition. Barring Pataakha (2018), perhaps.
O’Romeo is, by no means, the exception. O’yeah, give it a go.
