Actioner with a dash of emotion makes for a decent watch

Nonika Singh

The quaint title, ‘Bloody Daddy’, doesn’t promise much, but the names associated with it do. A lot. Ali Abbas Zafar, the director who has given us blockbusters like ‘Sultan’ and ‘Tiger Zinda Hai’, talented and dashing actor Shahid Kapoor who rarely disappoints and a battery of other consummate actors like Rajeev Khandelwal, Ronit Roy and Sanjay Kapoor. So, what do we get? To be honest, a mixed bag.

Set in the post-pandemic times, it reminds us how crime spiked after the Covid wave that killed thousands and impoverished as many. Interestingly, the film was shot in 36 days during the pandemic itself. Of course, once the narrative unfolds in this remake of the 2011 French thriller ‘Nuit Blanche’ (‘Sleepless Night’), the subject at hand could be true anytime, anywhere.

The very first scene takes us to a narcotics bust and a killing. Among the men who execute it is our star, Shahid Kapoor (Sumair Azad). A single father to a petulant and precocious young boy, is he a criminal out to make a fast buck? The director takes his own sweet time to rub in how Shahid and his associate are not ‘pretend cops’ covering the footprints of their crime but real policemen. Moral or amoral, the actioner is actually engaged in more of a police-police game rather than a chor-police one. Which cop is on the right side of the law and who isn’t? Apart from Khandelwal who plays Sameer, there is Diana Penty as Aditi aka Lady Singham. Not our words but that of the writers.

The writers — Zafar has co-written the film with Aditya Basu and Siddharth-Garima — anyway, have little room to flex their muscles. However, they do pack in a few funny lines here and there. Clearly, the heavylifting is done by the hero as he confronts his bête noire, Sikander (Ronit Roy), and his henchmen. Sure, kidnapper and drug dealer Sikander is a bad guy, even if he doesn’t look like one and is happy to order lactose-free chocolate shake for the boy he has kidnapped. No prizes for guessing that the ransom price is a bag of cocaine worth Rs 50 crore, which actually belongs to Sikander only.

Before the film cruises to an expected conclusion and we know that the barter will end up the right way, there is loads of action and Smart Alec moves by our hero. His maneuvers to outsmart both the cops and gangsters hold our attention. Needless to say, Shahid is the biggest asset of the film. Both as the bloody cop who shoots without blinking and the seemingly indifferent father who may not have time for his son but is ready to kill for him, he is effective if not superlative. His charm and the pace of the film in the first hour are enough to keep the momentum going. But in the sea-saw battle between the good cop, the bad cop and, of course, the army of bad men, repetitiveness creeps in somewhere.

Since the climax is a given and most of the action is centered in a hotel, the kitchen is the flashpoint, and Zafar loses the grip on our interest quotient. In a rush to tie the threads and the din of action that moves into a loop zone (one action sequence after another), even Badshah’s peppy number ‘Issa Vibe’ gets lost.

Streaming on JioCinema, which is upping its game in the field of entertainment with a slew of new releases, we would still call ‘Bloody Daddy’ a fair entertainer. Like us, if you watch it with zero expectations, it can certainly serve as a decent filler on a dreary evening. ‘Bloody Daddy’, which amps up Shahid’s badass action moves, isn’t bad at all.