Crazxy, the latest Hindi film starring Sohum Shah and directed by Girish Kohli, has aspirations to be a well-crafted single-character thriller. In fact, if you look at the way the movie transitions from the sophistication of a metro city to the recklessness of a barren land over the course of its story, you can see that there are efforts to present the idea in a more cinematic way. But the problem here is that it has a very preachy tone, and it is not going beyond your set of predictions. With a slightly crowded second half taking away the believability from the story, Crazxy is an earnest attempt that needed a bit more refinement.
Dr. Abhimanyu Sood, a prominent surgeon in New Delhi, is our central character, and he is a divorcee who has no interest in taking care of his only daughter. One day, while Abhimanyu was going to some place to crack a financial deal, he got a call from a stranger saying that he had kidnapped Abhimanyu’s daughter. Initially, Abhimanyu brushed it off as a prank call. But soon, he sort of realized the seriousness of it. What Abhimanyu has to go through in the next few hours is what we witness in Crazxy.
Starting with a long single-take shot, Girish Kohli sets the mood for the film as a racy, stylish one. We are practically shown the world and attitude of Abhimanyu in those initial bits by showing his interactions with various people. The film is only 93 minutes long, so Kohli is not beating around the bush to get to the central event in the story. Girish Kohli is setting up a lot of things casually in the beginning, and there are certain subplots, including the professional life of the hero, to steer the movie away from the logical questions like why can’t he take the help of cops, etc. However, Abhimanyu’s arrogance in certain portions of his negotiations with the kidnapper lacked conviction.
The most challenging thing about the script is the fact that it has to transform an insensitive, self-obsessed man into an empathizing human being in a really short time. So, in order to achieve that, the director shows us visual metaphors like how this man gets that fatherly trigger by seeing a small kid in another car. Because of the fast-paced initial areas of the movie that have a lot of chase moments and mind games happening with the kidnapper and the doctor, we are, in a way, interested to know how they will walk away from the template we all know through various other films of this genre. But in order to give a justification to the absurdity of the whole thing, Girish Kohli is creating a scene where the doctor is conducting surgery remotely. Well, that felt like an extreme choice of events to show the necessity of an “extreme” action.
Sohum Shah is the only performer here, and he pulls off the early arrogant bits and the eventual realization of that character in a convincing manner. Even though we are only hearing her voice, Nimisha Sajayan was able to make us feel the agony of the mother. Tinnu Anand, Shilpa Shukla, and Piyush Mishra are the other major voice artists in the film.
In terms of treatment, Crazxy wants to be pulpy, and it also wants to be slightly preachy about the idea of fatherhood. Achieving all this with self-imposed restrictions of limited characters and duration of roughly 90 minutes is fascinating and risky. And eventually, the movie ends up looking like a decent thriller, weighed down by its many wannabe elements.
Eventually, the movie ends up looking like a decent thriller, weighed down by its many wannabe elements.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
