Prem’s KD: The Devil flirts with the idea of an underdog’s ascent in a blood-soaked world of crime. This isn’t something we haven’t seen before. This transformation is, in fact, a core archetype in films from the South. The sudden blood on the hands might be the same, but the reason behind this ascent always differs. It was money in Yash’s KGF (2018), a sense of helplessness in Kamal Haasan’s Nayakan (1987) and a means for survival in Vijay’s Kannada film Duniya (2007). One might know how these films end, but it’s always the emotion behind these individual stories that routinely makes us tune in film after film. In Dhruva Sarja’s KD: The Devil, this emotion is a fierce love for family. The world is intriguing — it is set in 1975 Bengaluru, so flowing mullets and chiffons are in — and so are the characters. But the film is eventually dragged down by a relentless amount of excess.
This excess ranges from its dialogue (for a 140-minute film, KD: The Devil is fairly verbose) to its ill-placed songs to its relentless obsession with hyperviolent action set pieces. It is a simple film to begin with. A small-time kerosene dealer, Kaali (Dhruva Sarja), is a gentle giant. His world is small, and so are his priorities. He develops an obsession towards Deva (Sanjay Dutt), a local Kusthi legend and a mob boss who rules over Bengaluru with his wife Sathyavathi (Shilpa Shetty). This unlikely friendship is etched out with some nimbly written action scenes — a scuffle unfolding in a theatre, for instance, leads to solid kitschy drama on paper, which translates well on screen.
Another object of obsession in Kaali’s orbit is his estranged sibling Dharma (Ramesh Aravind), a righteous school teacher who has nothing in common with his happy-go-lucky younger brother. We gloss over their backstory in a few scenes, peering over their differences as children. But Prem doesn’t get into the specifics, and this hurts its cause later on for their subplot to make sense. The film instead spends a good chunk of its runtime on Kaali’s hot-and-cold relationship with Lakshmi (Reeshma Nanaiah), who goes by ‘Machete Lakshmi’ with good reason. Her character is integral to the plot, and she holds her own in a film running on a hypermasculine engine. But their romantic exchanges, pitched at an unnaturally high volume, begin to jar the nerves.
Sanjay Dutt, who gets some of the best scenes in the film’s first act, is immediately reduced to a mechanical villain bot, who sheds any layer of complexity he once held. The man who was once okay being humbled by a fighter far younger than him suddenly takes on an evil, masochistic turn, fuelled by political ambitions. This transformation is sudden and has a sour taste in a film that could've thrived on edgy, complex character development.
Sarja is sincere as the innocent underdog who is forced to rise to the occasion when his family's neck is on the line. But any intrigue the film managed to create in the beginning is lost to a templated second half, which is written and cut with a heavy hand. The last few minutes of the film are crammed with endless severed limbs, bloodshed, a surprise cameo, and the promise of certain characters taking on better parts in the sequel. KD will return, but one hopes he returns with a lot more substance the next time.