The first word people coming-out from watching the 40-odd-minute-long short-film Kattar Karachi in cinemas would likely be saying is: WHY?!?

The answer is kind of obvious: because one can.

That may sound snarky, a tad bit cruel, but hey, facts are facts.

Kattar Karachi is a meagre story that’s embedded between three music videos, and has little to do with Karachi and its ‘kattar-ness’ [hardcore ruthlessness]. The film banks on Talha Anjum, the co-partner of the hip hop-duo Young Stunners, who turns executive producer and lead actor in the film and, perhaps, in another universe, that might’ve been enough.

Kattar Karachi is a meagre story that’s embedded between three music videos that has little to do with Karachi and its ‘kattar-ness’

The plot — and I have great reservations about calling the barebones idea a “plot” — is about a young man named Talha, who works in a restaurant, and is somehow a threat to a land-grabbing mobster-baddie (Imran Ashraf) who wants to raze a small little community to the ground.

Why that young man, who has no distinguishing features to him (other than a tattoo on his neck) is a threat, one doesn’t know; he simply goes to work and spends a bit of a time with his elderly neighbours (they’re the stereotypical cardboard cut-outs of good lower-middle class parents that always nod yes to the hero of the film).

Talha’s only passingly aggressive act is to fancy an expensive car that’s parked outside a chai shop he frequents — an argument that his friend (Hussain Mohsin, quite good) soothes out.

Our angry young hero’s big act of aggression comes when he spooks off the land-grabbers’ punks (the bald-y enforcer is played by Syed Jameel, also quite good). Quite a bit later, near the last leg of the runtime, he sends a decapitated head as a forewarning for an impending climactic massacre.

Although this one act has the right motive (nothing else in the film carries any), one wonders when things turned this dark. To give this particular scene its due, there had been a foreshadowing about the perceived grisly nature of the city (Karachi is not as bad as films make it out to be, I tell you!), and the villains’ approach to offing people.

Screenwriter Bilal Atif’s story is amateurishly figured out, and pedestrianly written. While the barebones idea may have a movie in it somewhere — like all musings do; even the half-hearted ones — one would not find it here.

There is a love story in the midst (the heroine is Tanya, played by Kinza Hashmi), that just happens, and carries a bewildering rationale — and I don’t mean bewildering in a good way. Imran Ashraf, always quite a good actor, is at a particular handicap (not talking about the character’s limp). Not only is he underwritten, like Hashmi, but he is misdirected.

This leads me to the director, Abdul Wali Baloch, and the cinematographer Noor Turk: both are inspired by the grit of music videos, Bollywood and South Indian cinema. One doesn’t see a director’s mature hand anywhere, and the stark contrast-y colour-gradings (courtesy of editor and post-producer Bilal Sagar), and the use of cinema lenses are mere basic requirements for a film. Nothing on the technical side warrants longer discussions.

But there is an upside to Kattar Karachi: Talha Anjum.

The man’s raps are surprisingly good (duh!) — but what’s even more surprising is that he turns out to be an engaging, believable actor. One can compare him to a young Nana Patekar, provided he goes to film school and hones his acting skills.

Filmed on a handful of sets, one understands how this film may have come into being. One surmises that since a good deal of cash is spent on a music video, and known actors are cast, why not expand the shoot a few days to make a film out of it.

To paraphrase the Scooby Doo gang: And they might have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that darn ‘kattar’ amateurism that plagues Karachi, Punjab and Pakistani filmmakers.

Released by Hum Films, Kattar Karachi is rated ‘A’ for adults, though one has to look hard to find any semblance of maturity here

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 5th, 2025