It is criminal to flub a great 'mass' moment. Of all the industries, Telugu cinema should have formal laws against it. Early in Dacoit, a Hindi-Telugu bilingual, a prison van ferrying inmates breaks down at an intersection. It's the start of the 2020 coronavirus-induced lockdowns, jails are being decongested, and Hari (Adivi Sesh) — a man wrongfully convicted of murder and rape — is using the opportunity to stage a breakout. Against the screech of an onrushing train, Hari removes his mandatory face mask, shooting an evil grin to the driver. It's such a cool idea for a hero intro shot.... except the hero has already been introduced twenty minutes ago and we know what he looks like.
Hari nevertheless escapes his captors, ending a 13-year prison stint for a crime he didn’t commit. Amazingly, for all his suffering, his mental state has remained unscarred. He joins up with his contact (Atul Kulkarni) in Madanappali and is offered safe passage out of the country. The ask, of course, is a big sum of money, and fast. Hari also has unfinished business in town—Saraswati (Mrunal Thakur), a former lover who testified against him and ruined his life. Early flashbacks fill us in on their love story, and a central incident (involving caste-based violence) that forms the Rashomon-like fulcrum of the film.
Dacoit is the directorial debut of cinematographer Shaneil Deo, who shot the spy thriller Goodachari (2018), one of Sesh's biggest successes. The urge to marry a dense, twist-toting plot with the fixtures and fittings of an action movie continues in their newest collaboration. Hari tracks down Saraswati, who is now a wife and a mother. Her husband is in the hospital and she desperately needs money for a heart transplant (life is an escalation of melodramatic miseries for Saraswati). After a half-hearted confrontation, Hari appears to back off. He then makes her an offer: will she be his getaway driver on a robbery?
Hear now, I’m all for smashing stereotypes, but there’s nothing in Dacoit that marks out Saraswati as such a capable driver for the job. Of course, Hari has an endgame in mind, but why not go about it a little more…. logically? There are a dozen such conveniences in the plot. After their planned heist goes unsurprisingly awry, the former flames hit the road. This is where a film like Dacoit ought to click into gear. Deo gives us a series of crashes and escapes on dusty roads. The action design, though stylish, is always a cut behind other recent films, the soaring BGM promising a propulsion the images do not hold.
The film keeps peeling the onion of Hari and Saraswati’s ruinous past. In the present timeline, grand old geezers like Prakash Raj and Anurag Kashyap join the chase. Sesh, credited for story and screenplay with Deo, appears a little too chuffed about the cleverness of their plot. Almost everything that happens is in service of a future revelation or twist. The film proceeds as a patchwork of puzzles, an approach not uncommon to thrillers but often detrimental to a love story marked by tragedy. It's hard to buy into Hari and Saraswati as flesh-and-blood characters; they’re expensive mice in the maze of the film's final shape. In the Hindi version, which I watched in Mumbai, there are several mentions of 'dil', yet what the film urgently lacks is heart.
Dacoit has been described as a Western, in that the central character wears a bandit's mask and the final showdown unfolds among boulders on a barren hill (fun fact: the setting here is the outskirts of Bangalore, the same terrain where Sholay was filmed fifty years ago). Yet the modern Western is not a purely cosmetic genre. Filmmakers often deploy it to interrogate deeper themes of violence and prejudice. This is not the case with Dacoit — a popcorn flick without much pop — where caste oppression is strictly plot device and the pandemic a quirky setting.
There is a softness to Sesh the likeable, in-demand movie star that contradicts the film, especially in the first half, when we are meant to believe in Hari as a prison-hardened rogue set on revenge. We rarely feel the heat of his hate, or hurt. Thakur has been doing her finer work in Telugu-origin cinema. I wish Dacoit had the imagination to use her more prominently — the couple of scenes where Saraswati takes charge are comically short-lived. Kashyap, who's found honest employment acting in Southern films, is standard stunt casting. The director plays a cop who's recently taken holy initiation, and therefore cannot use a firearm. It's a funny little conceit, a bit like Brad Pitt’s reformed assassin in The Bullet Train.
Earlier this year, I yawned through the Hindi film O'Romeo, another doomed romance rejigged as an action entertainer (Hari referring to Saraswati as his 'Juliet' may have sealed the connection). Both movies demonstrate how quickly a familiar template can die. The Indian mainstream film is moving ahead at a rapid clip. To limit oneself is to risk obsolescence.