‘Kennedy’ review: A hallucinatory trip into uncontrolled corruption
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The Mumbai underworld has seemingly dissolved into the ether. Dawood Ibrahim does not live there anymore. Chhota Rajan and Abu Salem are in prison. What then of the gangster movie, a genre that has riveted Hindi filmmakers for close to three decades? Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy proposes an alternative.
In Kennedy, the hoodlums are now the Mumbai police. When it comes to extortion, blackmailing and law-breaking, the city’s designated protectors – hyperbolically self-described as “second only to Scotland Yard” – lead the pack , Kennedy gutsily suggests.
Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and finally out on ZEE5, Kennedy unfolds during the Covid pandemic. Masks play an important role in a plot inspired by the Antilla bomb scare incident from 2021: in an instance of fact being stranger than fiction, a Mumbai police unit planted a car with explosive material near businessman Mukesh Ambani’s mansion for reasons that remain murky.
In Kashyap’s screenplay, the chief driver of events is an assassin posing as a chauffeur for a car rental service. Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat) used to be a cop but is now an unofficial hitman for police commissioner Rasheed Khan (Mohit Takalkar).
The dead-eyed Indian cousin of Travis Bickle robotically dispenses lead on Rasheed’s orders. Along the way, Uday keeps running...