‘Kartavya’ has Some Radical Ideas, but Isn’t Diligent Enough on the Details |
While watching Kartavya, one can spot a pattern in the films Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment (RCE) wants to champion. After Atul Sabharwal’s Class of 83 (2020), Shanker Raman’s Love Hostel (2021), Pulkit’s own debut, Bhakshak (2024) comes the upstart director’s latest release – a cop procedural set in a faux-Haryana town called Jhamli, centered around a notorious Godman, a murder and the village elders set on avenging their humiliation with corpses.
Given how the space for the political film has been severely curtailed in the last few years, RCE’s films seem built around the socially vulnerable: orphaned girls, runaway lovers, kids imprisoned in service of Godmen. In a time when the studio could be making anything, props to RCE for picking these grim subjects and lending adequate gravitas to them.
SHO Pawan (Saif Ali Khan) gets an unusual assignment on the eve of his 40th birthday. A senior journalist, coming from Delhi, is to be picked up from the railway station by Pawan, along with a security detail, and safely escorted to her local accommodation. Probably having spent a large part of their careers being lax, none of the security detail’s spidey senses go off as a motorbike pulls along the journalist’s car, which is barely a few feet ahead of Pawan’s jeep. Both men on the bike unload their guns through the windshield of the journalist’s car, killing her in the process, and injuring Ashok (Sanjay Mishra) – Pawan’s trusted........