Sep 03, 2016 04:14 PM
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#Akira: First things first. I watched Murugadoss’s Ghajni in 2009 and I still wonder how it became such a huge hit. When I watched his second hindi film Holiday- A soldier is never off duty, it seemed to me that probably he had handed over his job to some soldier and gone on holiday for most part of the shooting. So honestly I was not expecting too much from Akira, except that I wanted to watch Anurag Kashyap on screen. But as a pleasant surprise Akira started on an interesting premise and sets the context for an action thriller.
The film starts with a sufi proverb that speaks about how life always tests one with the virtue that already exists in one self. As a girl growing up in Jodhpur Akira has been taught very early in her life the value of standing up for what is right, be strong enough to fight injustice and even be ready to pay the price for it. So as a kid she confronts antisocial elements who threw acid on her friend, gets into a brawl with them, accidentally ends up throwing acid on one of them and spends three years in juvenile remand home. When she moved to Mumbai she accidentally gets embroiled into a vicious net of deceit, crime and unwittingly becomes a threat to a group of corrupt cop led by a terrific Anurag Kashyap.
In spite of plot holes of the size of manholes the film manages to keep one on the edge of the seat till interval, thanks mainly to Kashyap who brilliantly plays his part of a maniac, joint puffing cop who doesn’t bat an eyelid while running his car over pavement dwellers, slapping an old professor or killing someone for money. Sonakshi Sinha as Akira effectively makes the transition as a martial art trained women ready to take the fight to the opposition. Her fights scenes are quite convincing.
It is post interval that the screen play gets convoluted with introduction of multiple logic defying plot points. Murugadoss seems to have developed a strange obsession with mental asylum may be due to the Ghajani success. However in Akira the long and languid mental asylum scenes become repetitive and too boring. Another problem with Akira has been its half baked characters. Konkana Sen’s key character of an honest and pregnant cop suffers from some rather unimaginative writing. However it is the final act where the butt kicking Akira decides to become a sacrificial lamb in order to save Mumbai from a possible communal violence seems the most bizarre one and probably been written while the writer was puffing a joint.
In spite of several loopholes Akira is a partially entertaining film that treads on a path away from the regular song, love and romance sequence and dares to present a film where the main protagonist is a female in Kill Bill mode. I will go out with 2.5 out of 5. Leave your brain at home and let reason take a sabbatical, go kick some serious butt!a
