Akira: Sonakshi all the way

Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Konkona Sen Sharma, Anurag Kashyap

Rated: 7/10

Akira is an out-an-out Sonakshi Sinha film and she does her best to save it. The problem is that she has a lot of saving to do. She has to save the plot which is patchy, she has to save the plummet at the end and she has to save the somewhat convoluted sequencing, which looks like a fallout of a fragile script.

However, having said that, Akira is an engaging film with delightful editing and sound values which lend a lot of crescendo its kickass woman main protagonist. It is a slick, well-dressed and good-looking mount which gets somewhat dented due to its mish-mash plot of corrupt policemen on an incredibly unscrupulous cash-and-kill-run under the dark-charactered ACP played with a lot of fun and frolic by director-turned-actor Anurag Kashyap.

If Sonakshi in her permed, crop-cut hair and well curated kurta and jeans dos is the good kickass student, Kashyap in all his smokey haze of debauchery is the bad kickass cop, a good counterfoil.

As the small-town girl who has spent time in a juvenile home for standing up to a well-connected bully, and is now a college student who has been wrongly picked up by the bad guys in the police, Sonakshi plays out her best role ever with realistic oeuvre. She is grounded in her dialogues, comes across as a delight of controlled histrionics despite the convulsing situations she is put through and she pretty much holds the film together. She should do more such roles simply because as the karate kid and then as the kick boxing youth, she comes across as convincing. And, by the way, she seems to have lost weight down the road from the Dabangg days.

The other good thing in this remake of a Tamil action-thriller is Kashyap. Clearly, as the baddest of bad cops in Mumbai, he is having a lot of fun doing bad things on screen and he does them engagingly. Konkana Sen as the “good” inspector is pregnant with a lot more than just her eight-month baby and shows up the limitations of goodness in a system with control and conviction.

All together, Akira is a good film which could have been much better had director AR Murugadoss done up the script and plot with more thinking.  

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 4 September, 2016