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Hindi remakes of Tamil hits have assumed the proportions of a torrent. Gumraah, directed by Vardhan Ketkar, is the latest. The film borrows the plot of 2019’s Thadam lock, stock and barrel. Freshness is the last think one can expect from it. Not that it ever appears inclined to make any visible effort in that direction.
While it is never obviously a bright idea to produce an iteration of a murder mystery, a recent one at that, Gumraah does not go majorly astray although it is, in the ultimate analysis, only a passably engaging whodunnit. It does manage to hold your attention while it lasts, especially if you have no idea at all about the contents of the original film.
The writer-director of Thadam, Magizh Thirumeni, is credited for the story on which Aseem Arora’s screenplay is based. When the film opts to move away from the plot, it does so only in minor ways. After a start that does not inspire much confidence, Gumraah wends its way through a flurry of twists and turns that obviously cannot be spelt out without giving away too much.
In the opening moments of the 129-minute Gumraah, a man is stabbed to death with a screwdriver in a bungalow in an upmarket Delhi neighbourhood. The killer is under a yellow hoodie that does little to hide his face. It isn’t meant to. The story rests on the man’s full visage being captured in a selfie clicked by a young couple in the house opposite the crime scene.
The cops stumble upon the crucial image soon after they swing into action. The commissioner of police deploys a rookie investigator Shalini Mathur (Mrunal Thakur) for the job. When one of the constables airily spins a theory about the sequence of events, the young lady curtly tells him he has got it all wrong.
Assistant Commissioner of Police Dhiren Yadav (Ronit Roy) reaches the bungalow as his men go about collecting evidence. He has no love lost for Shalini Mathur. It becomes instantly apparent that the rivalry between the old warhorse and the new police academy product is going to impact the progress of the probe.
The prime suspect, Arjun Sehgal (Aditya Roy Kapur), a civil engineer with an IIT degree and a flourishing career, is brought to the police station for interrogation. ACP Yadav is confident that this is an open-and-shut case because there is no doubt in his mind about the identity of the culprit.
His cockiness goes out the window when a lookalike of Arjun’s, Sooraj ‘Ronnie” Rana (Kapur again), a conman and gambler, is arrested while trying to flee the city. Arjun and Sooraj aren’t aware of each other while they are subjected to third-degree treatment in adjoining rooms in the police station. Neither makes a confession.
The cops are in a bind. Who was the guy who was spotted on the balcony of the bungalow where the murder took place? Matters are messed up further because one of the police officers has an axe to grind with one of the suspects. With the police force working at cross-purposes, the investigation is in danger of being derailed.
The film goes a bit off the track once the reveals quickly pile up after the intermission. The individual histories of the two suspects come to the fore and leave behind a puddle of mush. The contrived and convoluted course of the probe, too, is largely desultory.
It there is anything at all that is startling, is the overwhelmingly prosaic nature, if not outright drudgery, of this police procedural that does have a method but not enough madness to go from routine to rousing when the proceedings turn plodding.
Lead actor Aditya Roy Kapur plays two temperamentally different men. One is a suave corporate creature, the other is a street-smart trickster. Since the script does not allow the actor to project two distinct personalities, one of the guys wears solid single-colour formal shirts, the other is given a floral and silken shirt to sport. So, the differences between the two men are not even skin-deep.
Just in case you still cannot distinguish one from the other, Arjun has a girlfriend (Vedika Pinto), an IT professional who works in the Gurgaon building that houses his office. He woos her in the course of several trips that they make in an elevator.
Arjun asks her out for a coffee. She dismisses the question point-blank. Her stock response is: Sahi sawaal pucho (ask the right question). By the time Arjun does get around to doing what the girl demands, they have spent enough time in the elevator to know each other a bit.
This passage of the film only serves to take the spotlight away from the murder investigation. And like the lift in which the relationship blossoms, the film goes up and down on what has the feel of a mechanical pulley. There is no room here for any startling deviations from genre conventions.
To return to Sooraj, you can identify him by, apart from the colourful shirt he wears from beginning to end, his bum chum and partner in crime Chaddi (Deepak Kalra). The two get into big trouble with a gangster. Chaddi’s life is in danger unless Sooraj can pay a huge sum of money to the ruthless criminal.
So now, where are we? Sooraj seems to have a motive for murder – he is in urgent need of money. Arjun, on his part, has an alibi. No big deal, let’s get it over with, ACP Yadav intones. But no, the end of the case isn’t nigh. The policemen continue to go round in circles until our heads begin to spin. Every time one of them says that they know who the killer is, you know he/she is flying a kite.
Given his dual role, Aditya Roy Kapur is inevitably in every scene. The actor makes the most of the opportunity. Mrunal Thakur makes it through the film with a single expression that hovers between the deadpan and the bewildered. That about sums up Gumraah. The film’s mildly diverting generic drill is anything but exciting.
