Crakk opens with a terrible CGI visual of Vidyut Jammwal doing the train stunts, which are pretty infamous among Mumbai Locals. The thing with that visual and the visual effects is that it pretty much gives you a good idea about what you will endure in the next two and a half hours of the film. Produced by Jammwal himself under the banner Action Hero Films, the movie’s script seems like a desperate and disastrous attempt to justify the name of the production company. With a juvenile execution of a bloated broad-stroke script, the movie doesn’t even have a proper set piece, which was usually there in Vidyut Jammwal films.
So the movie is about a young man from Mumbai named Siddhu. As I already mentioned, he is this “Crakk” who does these daring stunts on top of moving trains, and he is doing all this to grab the attention of the makers of this Khatron Ke Khiladi-type competition named Maidaan, happening in Europe that will give the contestants a humongous amount of money. There is a tragic twist to the tale that Siddhu has already lost his brother, who participated in the same competition three years ago. What we see in Crakk is Siddhu’s efforts to win the championship.
Conceptually, this isn’t something that is unique, and we have seen similar stuff in franchises like The Death Race. While some of the Hollywood installments were like guilty pleasure popcorn entertainers, Crakk is not even trying to have some novelty. The hurried nature of the movie to take the hero to the main arena itself makes it a hastily assembled formula. Aditya Datt is taking so much time in entering the world of Maidaan that a typical Vidyut Jammwal action set piece is happening only after an hour.
The Tapori accent and the Mumbaikkar act of Vidyut Jammwal look really fake on screen, and Aditya Datt has tried to make him act in emotional bits in the movie in many areas, which really fell flat. Even the way the movie wants to pitch Siddhu as a witty guy is also making the performance unwatchable. Arjun Rampal is very much doing a fashion ramp walk in this movie that just wants an antagonist who can go shirtless in the climax. Nora Fatehi is doing less dancing and more acting in this film, and that’s a combination I don’t wish to see again. Amy Jackson plays this poorly-written police character whose Hindi really demanded subtitles, even for the ones who knew Hindi.
Co-written and directed by Aditya Datt, the movie’s writing is hilariously bad in many places. I mean, even the concept of Maidaan looks bizarre on paper. In films like Death Race, it is like an undisclosed location in the middle of nowhere kind of scenario. Here, people are going in and out of that place, and the police acting like they can’t do anything is somewhat funny. It’s like they just want to create this action set-piece package as they have Mr. Jammwal serving as the hero and producer, and they are just stuffing it with unimaginative set pieces that hardly manage to register. The visual effects are used extensively in this film, and almost 80% of the visual effects work sticks out because of its hasty and flawed nature.
Considering the filmography of Vidyut Jammwal and the movies that featured him, I wasn’t really expecting a path-breaking film. The least I was expecting it to be was to be a movie with quality action set-pieces that would showcase the primary skillset of Vidyut, which is of an acrobat. With that signature aspect of a Vidyut Jammwal movie taking the rear seat and the silly story and plastic sentiments of the movie taking itself way too seriously, Crakk becomes a tiringly long action film that sort of exposes the shortcomings of its leading man as an actor rather than capitalizing on his established skills.
Crakk becomes a tiringly long action film that sort of exposes the shortcomings of its leading man as an actor rather than capitalizing on his established skills.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
