Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Anurag Kashyap, Konkona Sen Sharma
Director: A.R. Murugadoss
The story of a self-reliant young girl who unwittingly gets involved in a crime can be a surefire winner since it can turn into a gripping action-thriller drama. For the most part, Akira is what you would expect an Akshay Kumar or a Salman Khan film to be: lean, mean and a roller-coaster ride filled with enough evocative scenes without slowing the pace. But, on a narrative level, it finds itself too bogged down in the familiar to achieve genuine lift-off — let alone anything memorable. The only difference is that we have a Sonakshi Sinha playing a tough girl who has never learned to take things in her stride. School-going Akira Sharma (Sonakshi Sinha) is a righteous girl who prefers martial arts classes to dance lessons, and is often fighting for justice. Once, after aborting three goons’ plans of burning a girl’s face with acid, she accidentally hurts the perpetrator, and is made to serve a prison term for a juvenile crime.
Years later, after her father’s (Atul Kulkarni) death, her brother (Chaitanya Choudhary) takes her and their mother (Smita Jaykar) to Mumbai where he lives with his wife and newborn son. After much hesitation, the Jodhpur-raised Akira calls Mumbai her home, joins college and stays in a hostel. As luck would have it, circumstances lead her to encounter a rowdy antagonistic gang of students at her college, making her rather unpopular. Meanwhile, away from her life, assistant commissioner of police Govind Rane (Anurag Kashyap) and his juniors, an inspector and a sub-inspector, along with the head constable, witness a car accident, and come across a huge stash of cash hidden in the car. Rane kills the (half dead) victim and decides to distribute the lolly. Rane is a philandering abuser who frequently exploits his victims in his own way, besides barking instructions at subordinates who lack his incisive street skills.
After a cluster of lies that implicate her, Akira gets mired in controversies. Her family’s ignorance and failure to protect her make her embroiled into a dangerous crime plot. Akira doesn’t revel in the full potential of an edge-of-the-seat thriller that it sets out to become. After some interesting moments in the first half, the second half has Sinha performing stunts that outsmart nearly all in the police department, quite unbelievably so. Her extraordinary intuitions that establish her as a profoundly gifted yet damaged girl become far-fetched after a while. Akira covers all of cop-crime usual fixations, as it’s another Mumbai-set crime thriller, but there are too many layers that writer-director A.R. Murugadoss adds to the storyline.
Akira’s vigilante tactics, which grow increasingly disturbing over the course of the film become irrational after a while as we get reminded of some similar Hindi film themes set in the ’80s and early ’90s about Rambolinas whose rage stemming out of all the wrongs around her have a disconcerting casualness. Remember zakhmi aurats who would display physical strength exactly the same way as the Dharmendras and Sunjay Dutts did in taking on the might of the corrupt. Of course, Akira is a good soul, though, after Ghajini, Murugadoss proves yet again that protagonists needn’t be likeable to command our attention: all they need to be is an interesting mix of the virtue and the mysterious.
And we get a fleeting glimpse of Akira’s mind at work, particularly when she means no harm to anyone, and goes about doing her business without judging anyone. Among the cast, Kashyap has an interesting role of an evil police who has no qualms about fulfilling his greed and lust. He, perhaps, consciously underplays the seething rage with nonchalance that one is unaccustomed to seeing in villains on screen. Haven’t we seen nasty anti-heroes menacingly shooting orders? Well, mostly. Here, Kashyap’s certain emotional coolness seems to make him enjoy his new avatar thoroughly, and he could be a welcome addition to the list of actors who could bring in some freshness.
After Vikramaditya Motwane’s Lootera, it’s refreshing to see Sinha getting another outlet to do something worthwhile in a pivotal role, and she shows her competence, though the overall package fails to fill the big screen. Konkona Sen Sharma is far too talented to be wasted in a role that could have been essayed by anybody. There’s another problem with the film: it doesn’t match the wild, other similarly amped-up films of the same genre. Rather, at the end, it implores us to take its very mechanical crime very seriously, even as its construction destabilises it. If the film were a tribute to the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, it doesn’t quite seem like an apt title nor is it a film that would have made the celebrated director even amused.
The writer is a film critic and has been reviewing films for over 15 years. He also writes on music, art and culture, and other human interest stories.
