“I like grey….in your beard,” says actress Srinidhi Shetty when Nani, playing Arjun one of the most uncouth cop-heroes of all times, asks her why she likes him.
It is a valid question. Which self-respecting woman would want to date a man, who treats women like they are fruitless palm trees. Arjun’s father (the underused Samuthirakani who looks uncomfortable playing the father) keeps frantically searching on apps for prospective matches for his surly vitriolic son.
But really, it’s a lost case. Arjun is a typhoon of political incorrectness. He manoeuvres his way through a torrent of police encounters with squirming suspects who are hung upside down and then made to bleed to death (we get the same feeling trying to keep watching this cop-a-bull yawn fest). He justifies his service to society by reminding his opponents that these men don’t deserve to live.
And who, pray tell, is Arjun to decide that? The hero of course! Nani plays the quick-fix cop with a blend of the boorish and brutal. He is unstoppable, no matter how many hurdles the plot places in his way.
Arjun, very clearly, has an anger-management problem. He shouts at a man for shaking his leg while talking. This behaviour seems more suitable to Nana(Patekar) than Nani. But who are we to complain? Getting knowingly into star vehicles which try to pander to the actor’s fan-base by projecting him in a “different” (read: aggressive) light, is the current blight in our doomed industry.
Nani falls for it, and expects the audience to do the same. This shoddily written action film is the nightmare version of Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya where the cop is so confused and enraged by the system that empowers the corrupt that he ends up throttling a powerful politician.
I don’t know about the cop-hero Arjun. But I was insanely annoyed by the villain in Hit Case 3, a bloke called Alpha who operates an underground organization which wants to annihilate the world… Or so it seems. Understanding the motives of a character played by Prateik Babbar is akin to getting to the bottom of the biggest mystery of the Indian film industry: why do certain actors get work even though they are worthless?
A larger question: how did Nani reach Case No 3 in this monstrosity of a franchise. It is like Salman Khan’s Sikander notching a third segment.
You get the picture. A star-actor, no matter how big, cannot awaken a dead franchise. Hit:The Third Case is clearly a nut case. The hero behaves like the Chainsaw Killer and the villain resembles an overgrown child vandalizing a departmental store.
The conversations try so hard to be “cool” they topple over their own cleverness. The writing is clearly a scrawl on the wall. For no rhyme or reason, the cop hero takes off for Kashmir to tackle terrorists. Is he a sucker for punishment postings?
There has got to be some reason for why the hero behaves as though he is high on something more than self-flagellation.
