The image of Akshay Khanna as a staunch, methodical policeman standing as a silhouette against a gloomy background gives you the feeling of déjà vu. This is not the first time Akshay has played a quick-witted cop being duped by smart-aleck perps. The list starts just a few months back with Mom and stretches all the way to 2006’s atrocious 36 China Town.

In Ittefaq, a newfangled remake of Yash Chopra’s 1969 thriller, Akshay plays a nifty update of the stereotypical good-guy cop. Dev (his character) is soft-spoken, dresses immaculately in a starched white shirt and cleans his already shiny black shoes whenever he notices dirt on them. He is an uncomplicated soul who is a stickler for details and cleanliness, and yet doesn’t have the patience or concentration to read more than a few pages of a novel.

Dev is not perfect, doesn’t instantly make the right connections, but isn’t dumb enough to jump to obvious conclusions. His fallibility and laidback posture turn him into a perfect leading man to anchor a multi-aspect murder mystery.

Ittefaq tries hard to be a smartly written whodunit thriller but fails because it has lifeless characters

If this were a franchise — and there’s no stopping the filmmakers to make it one — Dev would be the new Sherlock or Poirot. Of course, those two were not exactly policemen, but you get my gist (I am deliberately staying away from referencing India’s CID or any CSI character).

As far as Ittefaq goes, we first meet Dev when he is woken up in the middle of the night and thrown headfirst into a hot mess. Vikram Sethi (Siddharth Malhotra), a handsome best-selling author, is on the run from the police after calling them himself. His wife lies dead on the floor of their suite at the JW Marriott, and the police, being dumb, insinuate him as her murderer. Vikram perspires by the bucket-load and leads the police through a city-wide chase, ending up randomly at an apartment where another dead body is on the floor (Ittefaq — coincidence — or simply bad luck?).

The woman of the house — Maya (a sultrily dressed Sonakshi Sinha) — tells the police that Vikram held her hostage and then killed her husband. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence on display: a broken glass table in the living room, signs of struggle and a bruise on Maya’s neck.

Dev is not perfect, doesn’t instantly make the right connections, but isn’t dumb enough to jump to obvious conclusions. His fallibility and laidback posture turn him into a perfect leading man to anchor a multi-aspect murder mystery.

When Dev ponders about Vikram’s motive for killing Maya’s husband — whom he hadn’t met before — she answers: “Vikram has killed his own wife. Killing a stranger wouldn’t make a difference.” As dodgy as Maya’s testimony is, it makes sense at the time.

Ittefaq tries to be a smartly written whodunit thriller. However, its lack of puzzles and the lifelessness of its characters do not help us sympathise with anyone on-screen. We know Maya is shedding crocodile tears and that Vikram is too-good-to-be-true as an innocent caught in bewildering circumstances.

The screenplay by director Abhay Chopra doesn’t mask anyone’s intentions. It, instead, tries to tone-down the direness of the plot by pepping up the movie’s supporting cast.

With Dev are two half-witted subordinates, and later in a small fun scene, a small bit of evidence is brought out by a family who mistakenly believe that police interrogators generally bring television cameras with them. Such brief instances help Ittefaq a lot. Even with its running time of about 100 minutes, the movie desperately needed relief points to diverge one’s stifling yawns. The story by itself is derivative and predictable — even when it pulls a 180-degree reveal by its climax.

Chopra’s decision to remake the 1969 original into a police procedural is a shrewd move. Dev is interesting, because Akshay (often an excellent actor) fine tunes his experience from similar roles into creating a perfect archetype for, hopefully, future movies. The rest of the movie is seen-it-before drivel.

Published in Dawn, ICON, November 12th, 2017