'Gumraah' Review: Aditya Roy Kapur Film Is More of a Let Down Than It Is Fun

Like Shakespeare's 'The Comedy of Errors' and all its iterations will tell you, a story with twins as protagonists is brimming with premise for comedy, drama, mystery, suspense, you name it. Now whether this premise is realised or not, depends on the creator.

Aditya Roy Kapur's latest, Gumraah, runs on that premise and the old Bollywood formula of two dissimilar people with the same face.

The story opens with murder. A man is found dead in his apartment in Delhi and the culprit seemingly didn't leave any clues behind. Regardless, before a cop Shivani Mathur (Mrunal Thakur) arrives on the scene, the police seem to be doing a shoddy job. She finally finds a first and major clue, the suspect was captured on camera by a young couple.

Going by the glimpse of his face alone (any other identifying features are shrouded in a yellow raincoat), two suspects are brought in - an engineer Dhiren Yadav (Roy Kapur) and a command Sooraj Rana (also Roy Kapur).

Naturally, prejudice affects opinions and sides are taken. Additionally, the ACP Dhiren Yadav (Ronit Roy) seems to already have it out for Sahgal. For some reason, Rana has a unique grasp on the law which does add an interesting dimension to his character.

As a premise, Gumraah is pretty strong and could even afford to ask the audience to suspend disbelief…IF the film had anything else going for it.

The maker adds self-explanatory title cards to the film which seem to be purely an attempt at a different format. It has none of the wit of Aasmaan Bhardwaj's Kuttey for instance.

A remake of the Tamil film Thadam, the movie in the hands of director Vardhan Ketkar does nothing more than you'd expect. And that's never a great quality for a thriller. Halfway through, you'd be praying for your intuition to be wrong.

Thadam, despite its flaws, seemed to care more about its characters than Gumraah does. The camera zooms into women's bodies in an almost exploitative fashion – sometimes understanding the presence of the male gaze can be a nuanced, difficult reading but not here. It's there.

At some point, cinema will move past graphic violence against a female character who is positioned as a damsel in distress let down.

It's interesting that the same film also has a flawed, nuanced female character but she's the 'mother', the catalyst. It's still one of the film's most watchable performances.

This is a role Ronit Roy could play without a script; he performs Dhiren with all that is required. Roy Kapur plays Sahgal with finesse but his role as Sooraj is tropey and just isn't convincing. Bring back Shaan Sengupta (The Night Manager).

Mrunal Thakur gets points for dialogue delivery but her emotional performance stays one-tone. But there's literally nothing more asked of her.

The film survives only because of Magizh Thirumeni's story.