A Situational & Eventful Thriller With a Few Lose Ends

Visfot Review
★★★★★

Based on the Venezuelan thriller drama Rock, Paper and Scissors (2012), Visfot is an eventful thriller because it carries multiple layers to its basic storyline. The idea of linking three different stories together was fun back in the late 1990s, when British capers actually brought something unique and interesting. But for today (2024), it seems outdated. Visfot might have felt much better a decade ago, right after the original, when Bollywood audiences were not ready to see something like this. Now, it’s cheesy and corny. No matter how many twists you show to the audience, they have become used to it by now (thanks to OTT and subtitles that they watch movies outside the Hindi industry). Even Tamil and Kannada thrillers have been made on a similar plot where two or three different sets of people are linked together to one crime, and at the end, almost everyone loses something. Visfot belongs to that cliched club.

Visfot begins with Shoaib (Fardeen Khan) sitting with his Dongri friends and taking a jacket home that has drugs worth Rs. 20 lacs. The same night he goes to see his girlfriend and forgets all about the jacket. The next day, he returns home and the jacket is gone, and then comes his dongri friends to get it back. The drugs belong to Acid Tai (Seema Biswas), who must get it back, and now she wants Rs. 2 crore ransom from a kid’s parents who has been mistakenly brought home by Shoaib and his girlfriend. The kid’s father, Aakash (Riteish Deshmukh), is a pilot, and he is disturbed by the fact that his wife (played by Priya Bapat) is having an affair with somebody else, and then this news of his son’s kidnapping leaves him shattered. He must collect Rs. 2 crore and get his son back, while Shoaib is given a task to handle this operation and get the money from Acid Tai. Will things go as planned?

Remaking an international/foreign movie is a difficult task because you can’t really have those husband-and-wife conflicts here easily. Our society and traditions differ, so the entire idea of trying to whitewash Akash and his wife’s affair doesn’t really make any sense. “It’s me,” she says after being caught red-handed, and you are like, “Yeah, she is a modern girl.” But how long can you take it from there? She keeps the same attitude throughout the film, and Akash also keeps taunting her in between, which spoils the mood of a thrilling plot. The same goes with Shoaib and his girlfriend when you see them getting intimate, only to extend two more minutes of the runtime, causing loose breaks. Those days are gone when the audience used to like these kissing scenes and all. Don’t sell the same old whisky again. Visfot still manages a pretty decent show otherwise, but you can’t really overlook those flaws that hurt the grip of the narrative. When it comes to a thriller, you cannot afford such useless moments because every minute counts. In about two hours, Visfot wastes almost 30 minutes on this boyfriend and girlfriend and husband and wife drama, and then there is that mother angle, which is too weak already.

Performance-wise, Riteish Deshmukh has done a decent job here. That frustration he shows on multiple occasions, such as while driving a car, when he hears car horns, while talking to the kidnapper or the officers, and every time he sees the boyfriend of his wife—it’s all so good. Priya Bapat has one hot scene and many emotional scenes, which she got somewhat right. Fardeen Khan misfires, except for the middle portion. That “Manya” scream in the end was so outdated, man. Even 60s Bollywood movies had better screams than this. Krystal D’Souza looks the hottest, and maybe that’s why she was there. Seema Biswas makes a deadly female don, despite low screen space, while a talented actress like Sheeba Chaddha gets a poor role to play. The supporting cast does fine, nothing great.

Visfot lacks a lavish production design, and it is very much visible on the screen. The editing and sound design also lack finesse. The cinematography doesn’t help either, as you see many top views coming with no effect and no context (to the movie). Visfot barely has anything in the music section, but the background score had a better scope, which is wasted. Overall, the technical team doesn’t seem to have tried anything impactful.

Kookie Gulati should have made it a modern saga with that thrilling use of background score and cutting scenes into each other in between, or he could have used the chronological narrative (he does that in one scene when the kid gets kidnapped) to attend this eccentric crime drama. However, the efforts are limited by his narrow vision, and therefore the viewing experience is stuck at a certain level. You are bound to expect more after the first half, but the second half only follows dated methods of storytelling to bore you for an hour.