A court room drama beginning with a poor person getting arrested for the assassination of the chief minister of a state, KULDIP PATWAL: I Didn’t Do It commences like a taut thriller, but later turns out to be a pretty confused and messy, overconfident film due to more than one reason.
The biggest drawback of the film is its badly conceived and edited time frame where the narration initially takes you back 15 minutes before the crime, coming back to the present. Then goes 15 years back to make a point returning to the present and then again goes 12 years back to reveal a happening making no impact whatsoever in the entire case proceedings. In fact these continuous and confusing flashbacks unnecessarily try to give the film ‘a different off-beat feel’ that simply falls flat and affects it the most.
The next annoying part is the completely forced Punjabi lingo given to Gulshan Devaiah, who sincerely tries to hold your interest throughout but never gets the support from either the writing or the direction. Particularly his appearance with a fake moustache and the language limits his performance to just another well attempted act that actually could have saved the film.
Further, the final nail in the coffin is the climax revelation of a weird twist that makes you laugh instead of getting shocked, coming as a huge disappointment.
A lame and ineffective attempt with a potential premise actually gets ruined by all its vaguely and carelessly written characters like of a mother addicted to drinking (and that too in a poor family), a routine jealous fellow politician, a cliched opportunist businessman (hoarder), a typical elderly leader of the political party and a lady-lawyer fighting the case against the accused, who later turns out to be the wife of the assassinated chief minister. Moreover the film simply wastes good actors like Gulshan Devaiah and Anurag Arora, plus fails to present both Parvin Dabas and Raima Sen in any convincing manner.
In short there are only two bright features of KULDIP PATWAL: I Didn’t Do It, written and directed by Remy Kohli. One is the much believable and realistic portrayal of Deepak Dobriyal as the accused (especially in the emotional scenes). And two, the evils of our system pointed out in its various sequences dealing with reservation quota politics, unemployment resulting from the same, corruption in political parties, lack of proper medical and health facilities for the poor and the age-old questionable system mostly affecting the underprivileged taking them as granted. Other than that, there is one particular sequence I would like to appreciate where Deepak assumes eating his meal looking at the plate of the person sitting next to him in a roadside dhaba.
Overall, this can only be given a try for Deepak Dobriyal alone in the coming months on a TV channel or an authorized online portal without spending any extra money. But watching it at a costly multiplex, showing it in a single unconfirmed show and that too in the odd timings of a day remains strictly avoidable.
At the same time, I wonder how even worth watching smaller films are supposed to reach their audience receiving such questionable step treatment from this multiplex-mafia.
Ratings : 1.5 + 0.5 (with the additional 0.5 for the social issues or curses addressed in the narration)
(The article was first published on UC-News Mobile App platform in February 2018)
