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Join UsStar Cast: Upendra, Kichcha Sudeep, Shriya Saran, Murli Sharma, and ensemble.
Director: R. Chandru, Shivu Hiremath, and Soori
What’s Good: The production design and lighting departments are the only two who took their assignments a bit seriously.
What’s Bad: Rest everyone decided to copy from other’s sheet, and one has to see the sheer audacity of a team of people hell-bent on wasting a lot of money. There’s even a part two.
Loo Break: Whenever someone decides to smear someone’s head, we should all take mental breaks. Loo will serve as a meditation centre in this case.
Watch or Not?: If you have nothing else left to see, you might still want to watch that beautiful tree from your window. Also, I honestly want your eardrums to be safe.
Language: Kannada.
Available on: Theatres Near You.
Runtime: 136 Minutes.
User Rating:
I will try. Decades after independence, two sons of a dead king who eloped with their mother are in hiding in the South of India. When they grow up, one of the two is murdered, and the other roams around seeking revenge, only to kill people and splash the watermelon juice out of them.
Kabzaa Movie Review: Script Analysis
You know, there are some films that test your patience to an extent where you just want all of it to end or at least the theatre to burn down, so the misery ends once and for all—precisely that. Kannada cinema, indeed has found itself in a very new light as we speak. KGF, Kantara, and 777 Charlie are shining examples. While not a fan of the Yash starrer, I agree it brings panache to the screen, which is why Rocky Bhai stands out and entertains. But it is a path carved for an entire industry, and the rest should march with a versatile product and not just end up rehashing what worked last.
Written by M Chandramouli and R. Chandru, Underworld Ka Kabzaa is literally a bunch of men gate-crashing a wonderful set every day and shooting narratives that will massage the ego of the evil inside them. Because nothing else explains the chaos and lack of story or structure to this movie that is, so hell-bent on celebrating toxicity all the time. It is just trying to multiply everything done in the last similar franchise with no nuance to it.
The attempt is to tell a story of a righteous and naive man going all evil and turning into a monster that the world dreads. To shape this we need to explore his world, his mind, and what he stood for. But instead, the film, with its zillion cuts and hammy editing focuses on how he fires bullets without even moving his fingers.
This world claims to be a very intense horrifying setup where you will be afraid of some character. But the writing never really allows that to happen because every single character is a spoof of every gangster you have ever seen in the Indian cinema. They are caricatures, one note, and if that is not helping you to drop your plan to watch this one, one of the villains played by Nawab Shah has ‘cruel’ tattooed on his face under his eye. Like it isn’t enough that he is dressed like a drag queen on a big ship under the burning sun, and he is just one of the villains; the rest are even more hilarious.
The movie doesn’t take anything seriously other than the never-ending weird moustaches of its multiple characters. That is not how you built gangsters, guys. The film tries to be clever when it builds an entire fictional town visually, and the production and VFX team even deliver. But nothing is era-appropriate. Everything is either too modern or too dated. Plus, if you build a jail with metal gates for security and show the police force securing it without knowing that their everyday enemy has a helicopter to fly in, you are making a joke out of yourself.
Also, whoever wrote the dialogues for the Hindi dub must be heavily fined for using Google translator. They are so verbose and so bad that half of them will make you laugh your guts out in the most serious situation. They use ‘Mahatvapurna’ and ‘Copy’ in the same line. What is this? Why are we watching it?
Kabzaa Movie Review: Star Performance
Every actor is told to mimic somebody, and you can see it. There is no attempt to build a unique gangster whose story we would want to trace. The common brief for men is that they will have to walk around slitting throats and cutting heads. And women, of which only two inconsequential exist in this universe are supposed to serve the fragile egos of the men around them.
Kichcha Sudeep, who has been used as the face for promotions, is literally a cameo. Upendra looks like he is forced to be here. All the villains are supposedly performing for their auditions in the Drag Race. Nothing else explains Nawab Shah’s obsession with his own cleavage.
Kabzaa Movie Review: Direction, Music
The direction, or the lack of it in Kabzaa is just unbearable. The visuals are unnecessarily gory and loud to an extent that you just want all of this to stop because it is too poorly done. Creating an edgy gangster drama is not just killing people as pass time and showing gallons of blood coming out of a slit throat. It is much more than that, and the directors need to know it.
Music is just too loud for anyone who has ears. The art, costume, and production department need to have a word with a therapist, though. Why is my glass of Rasna thicker than your blood? Who decided the characters’ looks, and did they think this was a circus-themed movie? Who supplied an extensive eye makeup to Shriya Saran in the desert where there is literally not even a sapling around her palace and no connect with the outer world at all? Why did you say yes to this job?
Also, whoever decided to black out the screen after every five minutes throughout the movie and multiple times during an action sequence on the edit table, please don’t ever even think of repeating that.
Kabzaa Movie Review: The Last Word
Kabzaa is a crash course on how not to make a gangster drama because everything about it is wrong.
Kabzaa Trailer
Kabzaa releases on 17th March, 2023.
Share with us your experience of watching Kabzaa.
For more recommendations, read our Vaathi Movie Review here.
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