Rating : 3/5
Genre : Mystery
Year : 2019
Running time : 2 hours
Director : Sujoy Ghosh
Cast : Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu, Amrita Singh, Tony Luke, Manav Kaul
Kid rating : PG-13
I went in with high expectations for Badla given that the director was Sujoy Ghosh but am disappointed. I’d have expected a smarter film from him, and Badla is barely average, if that.
Naina Sethi (Pannu), an up and coming businesswoman stands accused of the murder of her boyfriend photographer Arjun Joseph (Luke). Her husband and child leave her when the affair comes to light. She decides to hire highly recommended lawyer Badal Gupta (Bachchan), and the both of them sit together to form a good defense for her.
And that is pretty much how the movie goes – it is two people – Naina and Badal – talking. In conversation Naina relates the details of the case, so a lot of the story is told via flashback-style enactments. Gupta stresses that he wants the absolute truth from Naina, but it is a game of cat and mouse with her hiding facts and he attempting to pry them from her. They conjecture about various scenarios, some from her viewpoint and others from his counter viewpoint, he playing devils’s advocate. Naina proclaims her innocence; Gupta is not quite convinced.
So Badla is conversation heavy. Which in itself is not problematic, but the film drags its feet. The pace is slow and plodding especially for a movie of the murder-mystery genre. I actually nodded off a couple of times in the first half, but I really woke up once Gupta started pointing out flaws in Naina’s story and coming up with alternative scenarios. I wish the enactment of the scenarios had been swifter and speedier. A lot of the first half focused on Gupta sermonizing and repetitively demanding the truth and Naina professing her sainthood – not very interesting to watch again and again.
The characters lack depth. Naina could have been an interesting character – there were a lot of places Ghosh could have gone with her – but he doesn’t. She just isn’t very well fleshed out. Badal Gupta is just so smarmy and smug, and need I point out the filmi name? Then there were these implausible sounding scenes – like the one where Rani Kaur (Amrita Singh), an absolute stranger, gabs on very friendly terms to Arjun. Yes, the locale is Glasgow and one might argue that the heart gets fonder for apne log in pardes, but still!
The ending was predictable but director Ghosh makes it worse with Bollywood-esque drama and rubbing the climactic plot-twist in our faces. A cleaner, sparer, subtler ending was called for instead. Pannu and Bachchan can both deliver fine performances (recall Manmarziyaan, Pink) given the right direction so I have to blame Ghosh for their mediocre performance in Badla. By comparison, Kahaani was a far better film, and while Ghosh can hold his own in short films (e.g. Ahalya) there’s some ways to go before he can deliver a sophisticated edge-of-your-seat thriller.
Badla is a step in the right direction for Bollywood where who-dun-its are few and far between, but I can’t quite recommend it.
Kidwise: Violence – this is a murder mystery!
