There is something about a pulpy potboiler that can’t be ignored. It’s not exactly eyeing to be in the annals of great cinema or literature. It succeeds if you turn the page if you keep watching.
, the second edition to the 2021 thriller , sheds the prequel’s flab of the small-town comedy and finally owns its mushy, menacing heart. It offers enjoyable cheap thrills till it gets entangled in the web of its own narrative. What begins as engaging increasingly turns into an ambient watch.
It becomes dragging and convoluted. You stop caring how they did it, as long as they got away. Don that backless blouse, stick that rose stem in your hair because dangerous lovers Rani (Taapsee Pannu) and Rishu (Vikrant Massey) are back.
The action has now shifted from Jwalapur to a less fictional Agra. Both Rani and Rishu are laying low after the events of the first film. One is suspected of killing, the other of being alive.
They cross paths in the cinematic rain, avoiding each other’s eyes more out of fear than longing. They talk via wireless earphones in a busy market or an isolated garden, like love-struck secret agents. But as always, there is the third man.
Sunny Kaushal plays Abhimanyu, a medical compounder who is simping after Rani. He runs after her autorickshaw, holding two mannequin heads (she works at a parlour and forgot them back home. It’s romantic).
Red roses in hand, he waits for her outside a movie theatre after buying all tickets for An Action Hero, a forgotten gem .