A Romeo. A Juliet. And a heartstopping sprint against time to secure a heart transplant. Shaneil Deo’s latest Telugu heist thriller Dacoit is plump with metaphor and opportunity. The milieu is intriguing — a land where time stays still and frigid, aka the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — giving our characters an actual reason to be wearing bandit masks. Before embarking on a heist, our Romeo and Juliet (Adivi Sesh’s Hari and Mrunal Thakur’s Saraswati) need to put behind them a string of niggles and one betrayal too many. The first few minutes of the Telugu film show us fleeting glimpses of what it could’ve been: a deeply complex romance heist. But as the film progresses, we fear it confuses convolution for human complexity.
Dacoit begins with a lot of pomp. The wrongly imprisoned Hari (Adivi Sesh) is angry and raring to go as he plots his escape from prison. But the ache to escape isn’t just to live his life as a free man, but to find out the reason behind the deception that locked his life in prison for 13 years. The plan is simple, really — get out, find Saraswati aka Juliet (Mrunal Thakur), harangue her for answers and flee to Dubai. But life isn’t that simple, and neither is our cinema. Hari is a tough nut to crack, and Sesh gives him a fair shot. Once a soft boy in love, carrying scars of oppression and the deepening pressures of falling for an affluent girl outside his caste, Hari has learned to turn his vulnerability into reckless anger in his time in the clink. Their romance, covered in quick, softly blurred flashbacks, tells us of their varied lived experiences.
Fresh out of prison, when Hari learns that his former lover is a ghost of herself, running to save the father of her young daughter with an expensive heart transplant, the anger in him swells. And with this raw resentment comes a sadistic plan. They will embark on a heist to get her the money. But what’s a heist without some good old double-crossing?
The issue with Dacoit is that the film isn’t concerned with a heist at all. Some characters provide the customary impediments to the leads, such as the owner of a fraudulent private chain of hospitals (Prakash Raj) and a police officer who wants to teach Hari a lesson for escaping on his daughter’s watch (Anurag Kashyap). The film takes a convoluted segue and takes us into the incessant medical malpractice that plagues most of our hospitals. We don’t know what that’s doing in a film like this, which already needs to comb through so many details — from the impending heist, Hari and Saraswati’s past, their caste identities and also their tragic romance.
The film lets Thakur have her moments, and she uses these scenes wisely to show Saraswathi's desperation. She might have failed as a partner, but she will do anything to avoid failing as a mother. But Dacoit doesn’t have the time to show us the emotional nuances of her character, or let alone any other. Even before we barely register Saraswati’s big secret, the film has been waiting on the answer to why she did the unspeakable to her partner and sent him to jail — we’re told to hold our horses. Because more twists and characters, perhaps rivalling M Night Shyamalan, are coming our way. After a while, we stop caring about the answer we were intently waiting for as we’re subjected to an assembly line of “plot twists” that do nothing for the film.
Danush Bhaskar films the action scenes with as much ease as he does the lighter, softer scenes we see these dacoits in. The music keeps things playful and gives the early scenes some character. But in the end, a question remains. We're left wondering whether the film would've held up even as much as it did without the likability of its leads.