Only Aparshakti Khurana took the assignment seriously, and the rest were clueless.

Dhokha: Round D Corner Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Aparshakti Khurana, R Madhavan, Khushali Kumar, Darshan Kumaar & ensemble.

Director: Kookie Gulati

What’s Good: Aparshakti Khurana trying to save a lost battle and the runtime that saves the audience a bit.

What’s Bad: The lack of responsible people on board to greenlit good scripts. There is an abundance of ignorance and whole lot of money wasted in telling a bad story.

Loo Break: I say this in a very few reviews, stay in there and scroll through Instagram reels. They have much more to offer than this movie.

Watch or Not?: If you have no other option, you can subject yourself to this but I don’t think you have reached that dead end yet.

Language: Hindi (with subtitles).

Available on: In Theatres Near You.

Runtime: 111 Minutes.

User Rating:

So a terrorist (Aparshakti) who is taken to serve his death sentence breaks loose and hijacks a woman (Khushali) in her house. He demands for a few things. But the terrorist is not the only threat in that house but the hijacked woman too has a problem. Her husband (Maddy) is between all of this and the dhokha literally hits hard in all the wrong ways.

Dhokha: Round D Corner Movie Review: Script Analysis

Amongst many virtues the team Dhokha Round D Corner might have, logic is certainly not on the list. Because the biggest thing that lacks here is logic and its application. If the definition of entertainment is rapidly turning into ‘leave your brains at home’ or ‘this is suspension of disbelief’ we need to sit and reassess our choices as a fraternity. Because vanilla scripts sold as top-notch thrillers and backed by noteworthy names are the biggest Dhokha with the audience.

Written by Kookie, the filmmaker has lately decided to be as lenient as possible. His approach to every single story he is touch right now is to oversimplify it to a point where it seems pointless. Be it his last movie The Big Bull or this latest thriller, he likes to dilute his material, characters, and arcs so much that they don’t stay interesting at all. And that results in a 2-hour long tasteless episode of banal characters who are nothing more than caricatures who are doing things that are of no interest.

For example, here he plants a cunning wife with a mental disorder, a husband who is clueless about why he even exists, a police officer who has zero knowledge about damage control and I don’t even want to talk about the snipers who stood there with guns for the entire day with 200 chances of shooting the terrorist but not even a single bullet was fired. All this together doesn’t thrill a person who has seen better, they make you chuckle and laugh about the fact that they traveled to see this.

In his writing, Gulati thinks that transferring a proven terrorist from one jail to another with just his hands tied with a rope and one cop handling him is correct. Or he is okay with the fact that a police officer is triggering the terrorist more while negotiating. Also, people are too calm to be in a vicinity that is under terrorist attack. Madhavan and Kumaar are continuously chit chatting and smoking like the terrorist will wait until their banter is over. You cannot ignore the daily soap approach and the twist that are from multiple episodes of Saavdhan India.

I haven’t even started yet. The blueprint of this movie tries to be smart as to confuse you about who is bad and who isn’t. But the character development and approach is so weak that 15 minutes and you already have an idea that the man is actually cheating. Don’t even let me tell you about the dialogues. They are so bizarre and funny that lines like ‘Gul ki planning per lipstick pher diya’ is a thing. Also someone told the dialogue writer that cuss words make a film edgy and he chose 2 of them to be repeated like a chant.

Nothing can beat how clueless everyone seems to be on the movie making it look like script was written on the sets. I honestly don’t know how do you describe this paper thin film anymore. Also how is Madhavan able to scale almost half the South Bombay in an hour in the evening? Where’s the traffic?

Dhokha: Round D Corner Movie Review: Star Performance

Aparshakti Khurana is the only one who has suffered the actual dhokha. Of course, he is overly dramatic in parts, but he has done the hardest work, and the rest only did their make-up and stood in front of the camera. The actor has genuinely changed his body language, and dialect and even went into some good trance to play this part, but to what use?

I can’t believe R Madhavan said yes to this banal role after Rocketry: The Nambi Effect. I would want to know if they were paid enough, because this is a heavily lost deal. He plays a part so lazy that his wife is with a terrorist and he sits there only to say 2 lines which look highly forced at random intervals. He gets to even have a big twist moment and even that is so ‘Crime Patrol’ of a script that you only laugh.

Like someone told Divya Khosla Kumar to not blink and stretch her eyes as bigger as she can, Khushali was advised to keep an intense poker face all the time to look edgy. But she ends up looking extremely clueless and in no way associated to the story. She has literally no layers other than how the men around her perceive her to be. Mostly with a lust in their eyes. She gets to say some of the deepest lines but only extracts laughter from the audience. There’s a very long way to go.

Darshan Kumaar gets two overtly dramatic characters to play one after the other. Yes, I am talking about The Kashmir Files and he did have a role that was just cinematic embodiment of ‘WHAT?’. Here he gets the most dumb things to do and the most funny (not intentionally) lines to speak. Why are you doing this to yourself Darshan?

Dhokha: Round D Corner Movie Review: Direction, Music

Kookie Gulati in his direction thinks of Dhokha Round D Corner as a longer version of a Crime Patrol Episode minus Anoop Soni. He doesn’t believe in letting the audience absorb the universe or understand his world. He begins the film so abruptly that there is no proper introduction to his characters so we can at least try to root for them. He chooses to begin it with a romantic Jubin Nautiyal song (because T-series annual subscription) and end it with a Tanishk Bagchi disco number (because T-series employment scheme). Between all this he creates something that neither entertains nor thrills.

The music is as staple and basic as T-Series music videos are these days. They are many but hardly any has substance.

Dhokha: Round D Corner Movie Review: The Last Word

I repeat myself for the zillionth time, people with all the money and influence are creating this without even being afraid of the scrutiny their decisions may receive. Maybe the audience is being taken too lightly. Demand what you are worthy of, not something that includes the pop culture on the poster and serves brainless fodder.

Dhokha: Round D Corner Trailer

Dhokha: Round D Corner releases on 23 September, 2022.