Twenty One Hours review: Daali Dhananjaya is delightful in this underwhelming crime thriller

3/5

Spoiler Ahead...

Story:

Inspector Srikanth (Dhananjaya), a maverick but skillful cop, is assigned the task of escorting Madhuri Menon (Durga Krishna) but the latter goes missing before he even gets to her. Srikanth is then compelled to track her down off the record but he has to first navigate through a complicated maze of drugs, deceit, and a whole barrage of unreliable characters. Is this a simple case of a woman disappearing or there's more than meets the eye? 

In many ways, the title Twenty-One Hours is misleading. Sure, the film has the element of time always lurking underneath because it mainly revolves around the disappearance and possible kidnapping of a woman. But in no manner is Twenty-One Hours a racy or temporal affair, and nor does it carry any maniacal energy to suggest that it is related to time, that it warrants such a cheesy title. Instead, the film is concerned mostly with deceit and moral ambiguity but it is unlikely that the makers were able to derive a luring title out of those elements. And just as with the title, the film's narrative too is grossly misleading in myriad ways.

At first glance, Twenty-One Hours is similar to most thrillers out there. As evidenced by the trailer, the disappearance of a woman sets off an off-the-record investigation led by the alcoholic and maverick Bengaluru cop Srikanth. There's an air of arrogance and nonchalance about Srikanth, as though power were his birthright, but that could also be one of the main reasons why he is deemed best suited for the task at hand. His neck is on the line too because he was earlier assigned the task of picking up the now-missing woman Madhuri Menon (played by Durga Krishna) by a minister friend and any glitch hereafter would mean he loses his job. And for a guy like Srikanth, power and potency are his lifelines so he is likely to go to great lengths to salvage the situation. For a film whose plot employs several known and conventional beats, it is the character of Srikanth that sets it slightly apart. 

What makes Twenty-One Hours an interesting watch, at least for the majority of it, is how it flirts with morality. Much like the film's greyish and desaturated color palette, there are shades of grey showing up in each of the many characters. For instance, Madhuri's father comes across at first as a desperate yet affable man looking for his missing daughter but minutes later, we are told through a flashback scene that he is, in fact, her stepfather who was even abusive towards her mother. Or Madhuri's mother-in-law, who is first seen only bawling about the lacking of a grandchild in her life, is later revealed to be a potential suspect in the disappearance. At every step, as Inspector Srikanth prods along, there's an apparent more-than-meets-the-eye element about each character, and director Jaishankar Pandit, along with his co-writer Vinod Sudheer, utilizes the Rashomon perspective to good effect. And with the ending in mind, it is interesting to retrace the steps and wonder if Inspector Srikanth's efforts in cracking the case were always meant for his own lustful enjoyment, or was the writing lackluster in terms of plot and design?

And yet, the film reeks of inconsistencies that end up harming it a bit too much. Crime-thrillers are available in abundance today and one can't make a film of this genre without any plot or tonal overlaps. But director Jaishankar Pandit makes the fatal flaw of adopting a western sensibility for his film and renders it completely inauthentic. Dhananjaya is mouthing clunky English lines but ends up looking out of place and a tad boorish too. And the story world, which comprises both Kannadigas and Malayalees living in Bengaluru, could have lent an interesting diasporic touch but the filmmaking is amateurish, and instead, we hear the Malayalam actors speak a Kannada that's offbeat and annoying. Even actors as talented and vibrant as Sudev Nair and Rahul Madhav, who play Madhuri's husband Renjith Menon and ex-boyfriend Vishal respectively, aren't able to save the day with their weird, one-dimensional characters.

Yet, somehow, Dhananjaya makes the film work with his magnetic screen presence. Despite the sequences that make him seem a little out of place, the actor holds his ground with assurance and infuses that corrupt energy in his character to great effect. Dhananjaya is sleazy, vile, and even loathsome but, quite strangely, his character has the same feverish charm that Harvey Keitel brought to his role in Abel Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant (1992). For a generation of actors that is increasingly growing reticent about letting loose and challenging political correctness, Dhananjaya's portrayal of Inspector Srikanth is a valiant effort that, unfortunately, is most likely to go unnoticed. 

Verdict:

For a film that's rigged with technical deficiencies, Twenty-One Hours is nevertheless an honest and exciting shot at an overblown genre. Very few films in the current generation question the audience's moral and ethical tendencies, and although director Jaishankar Pandit errs in terms of tonality and plotting, he still manages to put together a worthwhile watch that offers many pleasant surprises. The film's for you if you like a bit of genre subversion and a few twists along the road.