‘Detective Sherdil’ Movie Review: Diljit Dosanjh's Desi-Sherlock-In-Budapest Misfire

Detective Sherdil is a remarkably annoying film. It’s the kind of over-the-top detective drama that tries to be playful, weird and campy to conceal its alarming lack of substance. It’s a whodunnit that leaves the viewer wondering who the film-makers are, not who the killer is. Even as a Knives Out-coded murder mystery (a line in Sherdil’s intro rap goes “Sherlock and Bakshi could never compare!”), it makes a mockery of the format. The supersleuth spends the last 30 minutes explaining the entire plot to us under the guise of revealing his findings to the killer(s). Except it never sounds like he’s decoded the case; he just magically knows everything. There is barely any sense of how he figures it out — he just did, down to the finest detail of what every character was thinking. The film buries this lazy writing beneath a deafening background score and some of the most disorienting comic-book-style editing in recent memory. The transitions are so unserious that it’s hard to tell which shot a character is in.

All-round star Diljit Dosanjh stars in and as Detective Sherdil (real name: Karamchand), but the film doesn’t let him ham it up as much as it should. Dosanjh’s fluid presence is criminally wasted in a story that has no idea how to be clever. If the idea is to stage a flamboyant, cocky and cool desi detective (the location is Budapest for no good reason other than tax rebates), it remains an idea. The closest it comes to peak-silly is when Sherdil subdues a white woman during a combat sequence and then ends up swaying her around like a dance partner. At times, Sherdil simply looks like he’s in a music video, the camera swooning around him from different angles while his own voice echoes over the screen.

The central case revolves around the assassination of an Indian billionaire named Pankaj Bhatti (Boman Irani); he is shot in his car in broad daylight. The driver was busy peeing by the side of the road, because he is after all an Indian chap in Europe. The tattooed hitman is caught, but our genius detective rightly deducts that the real villains are those who hired said hitman. Most of the family become prime suspects: the cunning wife (Ratna Pathak Shah), greedy son (Sumeet Vyas), gold-digging daughter-in-law (Kashmira Irani), a spiritual-eccentric brother (Chunky Panday), the sweet deaf-mute daughter (Banita Sandhu, again), and the daughter’s working-class outsider boyfriend (Arjun Tanwar). The least likely of them is always a smirk away from being exposed as an undiagnosed psychopath. The twists are so obvious that, at this moment, they’re one of the two man-made structures that can be seen from outer space.

There’s also Sherdil’s Hungarian boss — could be British, could be American, could be badly dubbed — named Barry Kane, a football pun that perhaps nobody except flummoxed Tottenham Hotspur fans might get. Sherdil has a female colleague, Natasha (Diana Penty), who is so unimpressed and unexpressive all the time that one wonders if the character is a social experiment. Every establishing shot and filler is an aerial view of the Hungarian parliament building, even if the insides of the family mansion resemble a North Kolkata Airbnb listing. The film chooses to be careless about the genre: a suspect wearing a hoodie is mentioned at some point, but the identity of this person is conveyed much later. Every other sequence acts like it has something earth-shattering to show, with the music building up to a loud crescendo. When in doubt, Sherdil himself belts out the theme on a harmonica; Sunil from Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa would not be pleased with this habit. The gimmick is so overused that, by the end, I knew the exact moment I could yank off the headphones. That’s what good training feels like.

Diljit Dosanjh in a still from 'Detective Sherdil'

The premise ties itself into so many knots that it eventually quits and gives the NRI detective his elementary-my-dear-watson monologue in a strange accent. Sherdil can say anything he wants and they’d believe him: “the cat did it? Yes, a whisker is missing, you’re right”. The flashbacks struggle to find purpose (Boman Irani rivals Marion Cotillard’s doomed on-screen death in The Dark Knight Rises), so they resort to slow-mo action to inflate the screentime. Everyone wanted a slice of Pankaj’s 60-billion-euro business empire, so the only thing that makes sense in this nothing-burger of a film is that he leaves 10 percent of his wealth to his dog named Rabbit in his will. Doggy growls when Sherdil disagrees; doggy coos when Sherdil admits he’d have signed over 100 percent instead. In such cases, it’s only fair that the audience gets a few million, too. It’s the least that bad pulpfiction can do to reward the resilience of smashed-to-pulp reality. I could do with some of Pankaj’s money. The rents in Mumbai are insane, as is therapy.