In the first few minutes of Kaabil, an aptly-titled thriller from director Sanjay Gupta (and reworked from the 1980s’ Hollywood film Blind Fury and South Korean thriller Broken), we see a visually impaired man making break­fast. It is a simple and an unexpectedly fresh moment: Rohan (Hrithik Roshan, who does a fine job) is standing almost still, beating eggs, picking ingredients from a cupboard just slightly off his reach, while answering a phone call. The camera, intelligent enough to take a backseat, lets the screenplay, the actor and the production design — with god-rays filling in nooks and crannies from big open windows — tell an engaging and frank short story. He is blind, but he knows what he is doing.

This slight moment, one of many un-showy and perceptive ones in the first half of Kaabil, is also an enigma for someone who has followed Gupta’s career. Gupta (Kaante, Musafir and Zinda) has now become a master of mesmerising subtlety. The director — usually stealing bits from South Korean and Hollywood movies, having a style with pompously zippy cinematography, strobe-prone editing and unkind colour grading — here seems to be someone else for nearly an hour; a man whose reins are, maybe, pulled tight with blinkers shielding his eye-line from nonsensical excessiveness.

Rohan, after breakfast, has a meet-cute with Supriya (Yami Gautam) — who is also blind — falls in love and woos her into a quick-marriage, as if his paternal-clock is ticking. And then, because the trailers deem it necessary to spoil the plot, something bad happens.

Sanjay Gupta’s Kaabil, starring Hrithik Roshan, is refreshingly subtle for the most part

The predictable aspect of the story is not that Gautam’s character bites the big one — Kaabil is a revenge thriller after all — rather, it is how the screenplay, by Sanjay Masoom and Vijay Kumar Mishra, utilises most of their neatly laid-out story elements and forego devising ingenious high-points when Rohan goes into vengeance-mode. Yet, despite the minor snags, all of which pop-up post-intermission, Kaabil is perhaps the second best Hrithik Roshan movie from producers Filmkraft since Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai.

That movie, Roshan’s debut project, came seventeen years ago and, for better or worse, he has made small strides in his career as an actor. For the bulk of Kaabil’s running time, Roshan swerves between acting like an emblematic Bollywood leading man (complete with the familiar twitching of the face and solemn delivery of lines) to that of an actor who has extensively worked on his character and mannerisms. His blindness is more believable than Ms Gautam’s, with exception to an early dance number the two engage in. The soundtrack by Rajesh Roshan, by the way, is borderline atrocious.

The predictable aspect of the story is not that Gautam’s character bites the big one rather, it is how the screenplay, utilises most of their neatly laid-out story elements and forego devising ingenious high-points when Rohan goes into vengeance-mode. Despite the minor snags Kaabil is perhaps the second best Hrithik Roshan movie from producers Filmkraft since Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai.

Once Kaabil lays out the groundwork and romance, introducing the villains — brother Rohit and Ronit Roy (the former a goon, the latter a politician) in a nuanced manner – and augmenting the last hour momentum to keep it from nose-diving, it lets events progress on autopilot. At times, when required, the screenplay answers tricky questions with enough panache to make them plausible, and even realistic.

Rohan almost never displays the vim and vigour of a super-powered protagonist no matter the amount of conventional villainy the plot throws his way (kudos, in that context, to Ronit Roy for his considerable range which recalls the performances of Nana Patekar). At times Kaabil feels like a South Indian by-product with a keen grasp on technicalities; if only it were a tad more original, you’d be fooled for good.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, February 12th, 2017