‘Kennedy’ Movie Review: A Hitman Drama That Shoots Itself in the Foot

The Mumbai of Kennedy is dark and dystopian. It’s straight out of a Bhavesh Joshi-coded graphic novel: the sort of city that breeds neo-noir lawlessness, stylised violence and broken vigilantism. Bodies are maimed to Tchaikovsky compositions (performed by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, no less); a lyrical voice-over haunts the central figure; an indie-hop soundtrack bleeds into set-pieces that use time and stillness as a narrative weapon; heroic masks are worn to protect and destroy. Except this place is real. The dystopia is Covid-era Mumbai. Face-masks are still mandatory. Cultural distancing is rampant. Capitalism is suspended between lockdowns and life. A desperate police force runs extortion and contract-killing rackets in a crumbling economy. They are part of the political pandemic, leaching on the power-dynamic between ruling parties and billionaire industrialists. Survival is a divisive religion.

The masked central figure looks like a haunted vigilante — he’s a former cop named Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat) who is dead on paper — but he’s actually a sleepless psychopath looking for revenge. His alias is Kennedy, he stalks the night, and he does the dirty work for a corrupt police commissioner (Mohit Takalkar) who has promised to lead him to the gangster who wronged him. Kennedy murders for his boss like a corporate stooge with a covert side-gig; he throws in a few corpses of his own after clocking out. Violence has become so bureaucratic that he often seeks personality in his cold-blooded hitjobs. His apathy is artistic, almost as if he’s defying the morality of rogue-cop arcs. There is no ideology other than disillusionment; he slaughters good and bad people alike.

One of the merits of the Mumbai that Anurag Kashyap stages is this: even in a world bereft of humanity and conscience, ‘heroism’ lies in the eyes of the beholder. Kennedy is a terrible man, a villain of every possible story, but he is the protagonist by virtue of being his own monster in a system full of opportunistic and subservient demons. For better or worse, he’s a cog without a wheel: a ruthless antihero who does the job without sacrificing his sense of individualism. In a parallel universe, he could be a provocative storyteller who uses his director-for-hire status in a spineless industry to achieve personal catharsis. Rahul Bhat delivers quite the numb-slayer performance. It’s a tightrope walk: to be expressionless in body, not soul. His rendition of Kennedy is smarter than it looks because he is playing a rebel-by-default character — his insomnia not so much a taunt to “the city that never sleeps” as it is a consequence of his own resistance to emotion. In most movies, he would kill evil guys or extremist politicians and get a redemption arc on his way down. But Kashyap and his star excavate the decay instead of burying the dirt: Kennedy’s destination is humanity, not his process.

It’s a difficult route, though, one that’s often undone by its own excesses. It’s hard to appreciate the padding — the setting, the pandemic-age context, the angry undercurrents — when the core premise is so conventional. A ghostly hitman turning against his greedy employer is hardly novel. There are some vintage Kashyap-isms in how the violence toys with the viewer by unfolding beyond the purpose of a moment: often into the realms of mundanity. Like a scene where Kennedy goes to murder a local MLA only to see their property-hungry heir ‘join in’ on the carnage. Or a scene where he threatens a couple in the middle of a roadside handjob with a “aaya toh jayega (if you come, you will go)”. But there’s a sense that all the design and packaging work overtime to offset the familiarity of the mood-portrait. The overt political cues form the backdrop, yet the screenplay remains vague about how it all fits in. I can’t tell how much has been chopped off from the final version of this film. But the result is not nearly Orwellian enough — the specifics and stray nods to the nexus don’t add much beyond the texture. They come across as scattered references in a film straining to be more relevant and current in this climate.

I know that ‘indulgence’ is a term we freely use for the director — not always in an incriminating manner. But Kennedy literally employs it as a crutch: a get-out-of-jail card for a narrative imprisoned by its own volume. Sometimes it’s fun to watch because the cinephile in Kashyap has fun with a genre he once localised, but it becomes a drag after the atmospherics and visual language wear off. A hollowness sets in once the aesthetic takes over. Most of the parts are intriguing in isolation, like cool short film ideas strung together without adequate connective tissue. The detail of Kennedy moonlighting as a driver for an upscale cab service is neat (imagine the passengers he ferries), but it’s rarely capitalised on: a concept searching for a concentrated Mumbai movie. Sunny Leone’s tipsy character and her fascination with Kennedy — the mysterious man who bumps off someone in her building — feels half-baked: like a concept searching for a focused mobster movie. There’s the thread of Kennedy’s chatty roommate: a film-school-like gimmick searching for a sharp psychological thriller. Mohit Takalkar’s turn as the commissioner is enjoyable, because the man sounds like an ordinary criminal in a uniform who is unqualified at both levels. But it’s less than plausible that Kennedy keeps working for him like a faithful dog in the hope that he will feed him the don; the hitman isn’t built up as the kind of killing machine who needs contacts to find his target. Maybe it gives his bloodlust an ‘official’ outlet, but the flashbacks and guilt dilute the complexity of the character.

Movies like Kennedy are all about the diversions and idiosyncrasies within pre-existing formulas. The colour is supposed to be the point; the story itself is incidental. Opening with a Wordsworth quote, closing with totem-like ambiguity, those inner monologues — cinema is what happens to us while we’re busy expecting conflicts and resolutions. It invites us to be immersed in the space between dots that may or may not be joined. But Kennedy is, by nature, the kind of film that gets distracted by itself. It tries to be reality posing as vignettes of pulp-fiction. It tries to be substance masquerading as style. It tries until it stops. This crisis of identity floods the treatment of an assassin film named after an assassinated leader. It’s so dystopian that any truth has to be imagined. It’s so dark that it is all but undetectable to the naked eye.