One Day Justice Delivered movie review: Anupam Kher tries hard to get in some conviction by changing his body language depending on where he’s at.One Day Justice Delivered movie cast: Anupam Kher, Esha Gupta, Kumud Mishra
One Day Justice Delivered movie director: Ashok Nanda
One Day Justice Delivered movie rating: Half star
A retired judge, whose hands are tied in the court-room, puts the bead on a bunch of criminals who have gone scot-free.
This is not a bad premise for a spot-the-vigilante thriller, led by the trusty Anupam Kher. But the execution is so ham-fisted from opening to closing frame that you are left reeling.
The Ranchi-based Justice Tyagi (Kher) is the sort of sprightly elderly guy who goes for a morning walk, there to banter with a portly cop (Mishra: it’s hard to watch a movie these days without bumping into him) who’s out to lose some weight. Meanwhile, some of the town’s prominent citizens are disappearing: a doctor couple vanishes first, followed by a businessman who owns a sleazy hotel, and a few others. Who’s behind it? What’s going on?
No prizes for guessing the identity of the culprit, because that’s not a secret. Kher tries hard to get in some conviction by changing his body language depending on where he’s at: genial-grandpa air versus straight, determined gait, even if it’s hard to buy him as a torture expert, surrounded by barbed wire and menacing sharp objects.
But Esha Gupta’s arrival as a tough crime branch cop takes whatever little credibility the film had managed till then and flings it out of the window. Gupta makes her entry in a shimmying item number, and then shifts to an unmade browed, desperately-mangling-a-Haryanvi-accent policewoman, who rampages through whatever’s left of the flick, trying to ‘solve’ the ‘case’, and we are left with our heads in our hands. And poor Mishra, who is meant to be her ‘junior’, trying hard to keep his laughter in check.
At one point, she asks: is this a circus? That’s not a question.
