Dassehra
Synopsis:
Neil Nitin Mukesh is literally screaming into a burner phone while running through a dusty, chaotic street market that looks like it was filmed on a handycam and edited on a cheap laptop.
And then boom, guns are firing and nobody knows who is shooting at who because this entire movie is just pure unfiltered noise.
Dassehra is one of those wild indie-style crime dramas that tries so hard to be gritty that it loops back around to being completely baffling.
Let us just back up a second because before we get to the shooting and the shouting, we have to talk about Rudrapratap Singh, played by Neil, who is an encounter specialist.
He's sent in to clean up a filthy political mess in a state where elections are basically blood sports and nobody follows the law.
Tina Desai is also in this mess playing Aditi, and she looks genuinely confused in half her scenes like she accidentally wandered off a romantic comedy set and got trapped in a low-budget action flick.
Manish Vatsalya is also here playing a politician, and honestly he spends most of his screen time looking angrily out of tinted car windows while dramatic violin scrapes play on the soundtrack.
The whole plot kicks off because a young woman gets brutally raped and murdered, and it sparks massive public outrage that threatens to topple the ruling government.
The corrupt politicians need a scapegoat so they frame some innocent guys, but Rudrapratap smells a massive rat and refuses to play ball with the corrupt police higher-ups who just want to sweep the whole thing under a blood-stained rug.
God, the editing in this movie is so choppy that scenes end abruptly on people blinking.
We are watching heavy-handed political dialogue about power and corruption in Uttar Pradesh, and it feels like every single conversation happens in a dark room with ugly yellow lighting.
There is this one background extra wearing a neon green polo shirt who appears in three different completely unrelated locations just walking slowly in circles, and I cannot stop thinking about him.
He adds nothing to the narrative.
He's just strolling past crime scenes like he's looking for a good sandwich shop.
Anyway, the investigation gets messier and people start getting rubbed out left and right because nobody wants the truth about the gang rape coming to light.
And then bang, we smash right into the interval point.
Right when things get somewhat interesting, the screen cuts to black with zero warning and hits us with a booming brass fanfare that nearly knocks you out of your seat.
Bollywood movies love an intermission, but cutting a gritty political thriller right in the middle of a tense interrogation is just hilarious.
During the second half, the movie somehow gets even more convoluted.
There's a completely random song and dance sequence shoved right into the middle of a major manhunt.
Tina Desai is standing in a field looking sad while background dancers in bright pink dupattas spin around her like they didn't just hear about three murders happening five minutes ago.
Hindi films love to ruin their own pacing with forced musical numbers, but this one takes the crown for sheer awkwardness.
Rudrapratap keeps pushing forward with his investigation despite getting suspended and threatened by crooked ministers who keep talking about their caste vote banks.
Stuff happens so fast at this point that you miss massive plot points if you blink, like how Rudrapratap suddenly figures out who ordered the hit on the victim.
He just looks at a crumpled piece of paper and goes, I knew it was him all along, even though that character hadn't even been introduced yet.
Classic brilliant writing.
The climax approaches and the body count rises because everybody is double-crossing everybody else in a damp warehouse filled with rusty barrels.
Gunfire echoes endlessly.
Manish Vatsalya's character gets cornered and starts yelling about his political immunity right before a bullet catches him square in the chest.
Rudrapratap walks up to the main villain, delivers one last cheesy one-liner about justice and karma, and shoots him multiple times in the legs before the camera pans up to the grey sky.
That one side character whose mouth movements are completely out of sync with the audio track during the interrogation scene? It's a small thing, but it bugged me for twenty minutes straight after.
Manish Vatsalya takes the director's chair here and tries to graft a gritty procedural onto the standard political maneuvering you see in half the crime dramas coming out of Mumbai these days, though he forgets to build any actual tension before dropping us into the middle of a messy abduction plot. The screenplay by Saurabh Choudhary lurches between earnest attempts at hard-boiled realism and the kind of melodramatic shouting matches that feel leftover from a nineties VHS tape. You can practically hear the script turning pages as the investigative beats repeat themselves without offering any new narrative friction, which makes the middle forty minutes feel remarkably heavy even when characters are firing weapons or running down narrow lanes. Vatsalya wants to capture the bleakness of a corrupt system eating its own young, but his framing keeps defaulting to standard coverage rather than finding any visual urgency.
Neil Nitin Mukesh plays the earnest cop brought in to clean up the mess with the exact same tight-jawed intensity he brought to Johnny Gaddaar, though here the role lacks the delicious moral ambiguity that made his earlier work pop. He spends a lot of time walking purposefully down dusty corridors with his jacket flapping behind him, looking every bit the weary professional who has seen one too many compromised superiors. Tina Desai floats through the periphery as the voice of reason or perhaps just the romantic casualty of the plot, given very little to actually do other than look concerned near windows and answer phone calls at inconvenient hours. The supporting ensemble features a few veteran character actors who try to inject some flavor into the exposition-heavy dialogue, but they are consistently undermined by mixing that buries half their punchlines under ambient traffic noise.
The cinematography relies on a murky grey-brown color palette that suggests daylight is illegal in this particular district, turning every outdoor confrontation into an exercise in squinting at muddy shadows. Sound design fares even worse, particularly during the action sequences where every punch sounds like someone dropping a heavy textbook onto a wooden floor and gunshots echo with an artificial reverb that feels like it was added in a panic during final mix week. A recurring synth-heavy background cue hits us over the head every single time a character looks suspicious, which happens roughly every three minutes, draining the suspense long before the climax limps into view.
There is an underlying thematic ambition concerning the nexus of media sensationalism and political opportunism, suggesting that justice in these parts is just another commodity traded during election season, but the movie is far too distracted by its own convoluted plotting to say anything genuinely incisive about power. Hindi films have a long and honorable history of tackling administrative corruption without pulling their punches, yet this production settles for cheap cynicism instead of earned outrage.
You leave the theater wondering why everyone involved looked so intensely serious about material that barely registers on the emotional scale. It is not an offensive disaster by any stretch, just a collection of familiar genre tropes assembled without much curiosity or flair. Bollywood movies have raised their technical standards significantly over the past decade, which makes a sluggishly paced, poorly dubbed exercise like this feel even more out of step with contemporary expectations.