HIT movie review: The Vishwak Sen film is made with borrowed ideas, with no hint of originality.
HIT movie cast: Vishwak Sen, Ruhani Sharma
HIT movie director: Sailesh Kolanu
HIT movie ratings: 2 stars
Now, what is Homicide Intervention Team which is the full-form of HIT? Is it a special police unit like PreCrime police department from Minority Report (2002), whose members prevent a homicide by ‘intervening’ when it is in progress as opposed to investigating the crime after it is committed? After seeing HIT, my guess is as good as those of viewers who haven’t seen it yet.
Vikram (Vishwak Sen) is a total train-wreck of a cop. He is suffering from a traumatic event. And like all other old-school macho characters of Indian cinema, he tries to tough it out, instead of getting professional help. And that poor decision steaming from the overestimation of his strength and deep-rooted false masculine pride, makes him shiver, sweat and collapse every time he sees a streak of fire. Add to that a generous dosage of recklessness, you get Vikram, the ‘brightest’ mind in HIT.
I can see where director Sailesh Kolanu is going with it. A cop with a serious psychological problem is forced to come out of his sabbatical and take up the investigation of a missing girl, who happens to be his girlfriend Neha (Ruhani Sharma). And that makes him a moving and bouncing time-bomb that could explode any moment. But, this movie is also about HIT and to some extent, the director should explain what makes this special unit so special, no?
Instead, Sailesh makes HIT about Vikram who seems to have gone through several tough patches in his life and has lost his loved ones. The director keeps the backstory of Vikram in the shadows so that he can lay it on us in the sequels. And leaving enough loose ends for the second part seems to have been the main aim of Sailesh, who has also written this movie.
When you are making a procedural film, it is important to put the focus on procedure. On top of it, if you are creating a specialized police force, it becomes imperative to pack a lot of technical details in your script and give a distinctive character to the cop unit in question. Unfortunately, Sailesh has got the basics of this genre wrong. Instead of a path-breaking procedural thriller that we were promised, we get a movie that has been well-packaged with visual and audio elements to trick our minds into believing that we watched was a path-breaking procedural thriller.
The climax felt a bit like an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Typically, detective Jake Peralta solves the case of the episode in less than 60 seconds, after the showrunners allowed him to goof around for about 19 minutes. The climax of HIT felt forced and to some extent even unimportant for Sailesh. It seems all he wanted was to show off that he can cut a stylish looking and sounding movie for two whole hours.
HIT is made with borrowed ideas, with no hint of originality. And this is the movie’s biggest and perhaps only flaw. We have plenty of good looking cop movies, but rarely we see a movie like HIT that makes us a part of a cop’s routine life.