It Is A Shahid Kapoor Show All The Way

New Delhi:

Shahid Kapoor is in his element in Deva. He anchors the adroitly mounted thriller buoyed by a screenplay that, to great effect, significantly alters the plot of the film that it reworks (Mumbai Police, 2013). 

Director Rosshan Andrrews, in his first Hindi venture, adapts his own Malayalam film by not only tailoring it for the lead actor’s personality -the original project was ably top-lined by Prithviraj Sukumaran -but also liberally and judiciously sprinkling a mix of masala ingredients on a good cop-bad cop whodunnit.  

Deva journeys into the mind of a scarred and smouldering Mumbai policeman, who lets his fists do most of the talking on his behalf. And, bam, the truculent cop’s memory goes missing in action and all that he is left with is his reactive muscle impulses.  

His ability to let it rip when he is provoked or threatened, bail him out of tight spots even when his mind is not all there. He has enemies and detractors aplenty in the police force and outside of it. But the more cornered he appears, the more he seems to revel.     

In terms of the story that it tells – a tough policeman with the odds stacked against him, seeks a second chance in life and in a case that goes into a tailspin following a severe head injury. It combines elements from multiple action genres, ranging from the purely visceral to the psychological, from the predictably procedural to the startlingly edgy.  

So, is there anything new on offer in Deva? Yes, there is. Take a few facile narrative sleights in your stride and respond to the gritty spectacle of a cornered cop fighting his inner demons as well as the violent criminals swarming the Mumbai underworld, and you have a film that holds your attention all through its 157-minute runtime. It is not often that a movie this long does not begin to weigh heavy on the audience, once the novelty has worn off. 

Thanks to a combination of factors – the competent performances, the first-rate camerawork by cinematographer Amit Roy, the expertly calibrated editing by A. Sreekar Prasad and the lively background score by Jakes Bejoy – Deva does not lose its intensity even in the passages where the pace is allowed (as part of a larger design), to occasionally decline a tad.                   

A motorcycle crash (in the film’s first sequence) leaves the titular cop with an impaired memory. The process of recovery is slow but on the advice of a neurologist he returns to the thick of the action. He lands on his feet and the act of putting the shards back together helps him jog whatever is left of his memory.    

Two halves of the story of Dev Ambre (Shahid Kapoor) – pre-amnesia and post-amnesia – bring out the reasons behind the scars, inner turmoil and the moral laxity of Dev A and Dev B. It redounds on the latter ‘persona’ to attempt a claw-back into the muddied high-profile case, now floundering in a haze and redeem what the man’s former self has lost.    

Dev has good friends around him. His immediate boss, Farhan Khan (Pravesh Rana), is his sister’s husband. The wedding offers the screenwriters a pretext to stage the film’s solitary song-and-dance set piece, no matter how out of place it is. The sight of a scowling, cynical, pugnacious cop vigorously shaking a leg is hard to digest.  

Dev also banks on a valued colleague, Rohan D’Silva (Pavail Gulatie), who is a childhood pal he stands by, through thick and thin. A selfless act late in the first half serves to underscore the strength of the bonding between the two men. This moment in the plot is the pivot around which the interrupted investigation eventually revolves.      

Memory loss is an old narrative trope in popular cinema. Deva uses it as a key turning point in Dev Ambre’s relationship with his job, his much-maligned department and with the people who matter to him. The final lot includes an investigative journalist Diya Sathe (Pooja Hegde), a constable’s daughter. 

Diya offers to support Dev’s official probe with her skills at ferreting out information about how and why a wanted Mumbai criminal manages to repeatedly give the police, the slip. But her role is largely limited to what she is in here for – to serve as the hero’s romantic interest, which, too, wanes as the film nears its business end. In fact, barring the song at the wedding in which she joins in, she has to make do without a love ditty.   

Even less significant is Deepti Singh (Kubbra Sait), a member of the police posse that is charged with raiding the hideouts of criminals. Dev A thinks nothing of her but Dev B, now shorn of his prior prejudice, includes her in his operations. But this is a man’s world and there is little room for a woman in uniform. Deepti tags along, offers stray information or suggestions and stays out of the limelight. 

The devilish Dev has God-like power. He has a record of flying off the handle. Whether he is taking on a mafia don-turned-politician (Girish Kulkarni in a cameo) or a bunch of gangsters working for a crime lord, his methods are impetuous. In a courtroom sequence, the film reveals that Dev has five pending cases against him. His bosses have a tough time reining him in.  

Haven’t we seen many such cops before on our screens? We certainly have and yet Dev Ambre isn’t always the sort of flawed man going through the motions in his quest for redemption.     

Farhan helps him with gathering the scattered jigsaw pieces, which, on the face of it, seems like a perfectly logical thing for a friend to do. But somewhere along the line, in his narration to his trusted friend, Farhan throws light on a crucial detail that he would have had no way of being privy to.  

This element sticks out because it constitutes a key plot twist. It is an encounter in which a man on the run is gunned down and on which the rest of the film – a bit of the first half and all of the second – rests.  

Mercifully, such gaps aren’t the rule in Deva. The plot amendments that provide the film with a new run-up to the climax and the final denouement serve the purpose of keeping the audience guessing. So, even if you remember the Malayalam film and know how it winds up, Deva has something in store for you. 

It is a Shahid Kapoor show all the way but Deva certainly isn’t only for fans of the star.