Kathal Review: Half-Cooked Satire

Kathal has a fairly kooky premise, one that would fill up a half an hour sitcom in a bundle of studio laughs. But when stretched into a feature film, its whimsy slumps into awkward energy, observes Sukanya Verma.

Sleepy small towns laden in crime and corruption are fodder for murky thrillers and cheeky satire ever since OTT took off.

Almost as if demonstrating these extremes, close on the heels of the sombre Dahaad, which revolved around a female cop investigating the case of missing girls arrives Kathal, a police procedural of the comical kind where a lady inspector (Sanya Malhotra) must solve the case of two missing jackfruits from the local MLA's (Vijay Raaz) garden.

Set in the fictional town of Moba in Uttar Pradesh, these jackfruits are prized for their Malaysian origin and Uncle Hong pedigree. Pickle prepared from these special jackfruits fuels the MLA's political ambitions, residing in a sprawling home inhabited by cocky members and run by a curious staff.

'Rajneeti mein jo kaam sadachaar aur ooch vichar se nahi hote woh kabhi kabhi achar se ho jaate hain,' explains the aforementioned politician. It's only for Raaz's wacky charms and fretful manners that makes it a bigger deal than it is.

Kathal has a fairly kooky premise, one that would fill up a half an hour sitcom in a bundle of studio laughs. But when stretched into a feature film, its whimsy slumps into awkward energy.

There's not much one can do around jackfruits alone so Director Yashowardhan Mishra and Co-Writer Ashok Mishra throw in another mystery by way of the gardener's missing daughter. Except for the longest time this merry chase purely relies on its oddball bunch of bungling investigators and loony suspects to keep the farce going.

Sanya Malhotra's efficient cop Mahima Basor suffers fools left, right and centre. Be it her clueless boss SP Angrez Singh Randhawa (Gurpal Singh) hogging credit for her daredevilry when not busy in ball workouts and sipping beverages out of mug plastered with his picture on it or her sidekick Kunti (Neha Saraf) clumsily juggling between domestic chores and duty calls.

There's also an obligatory romantic track involving Mahima's constable beau Saurabh Dwivedi (Anantvijay Joshi). As if his poor judgement isn't disappointing enough, Mahima goes ahead and pleads his case to their superiors for promotion.

Despite the feeble writing, Joshi's docile disposition and believable regret makes a case for his fumbling ways as does his disarming camaraderie around Malhotra. The latter delivers yet another confident performance evoking a classic Shakespearean sentiment -- though she be but little she is fierce.

Kathal has the best of comedians on a platter. There's Rajpal Yadav's bald pate and hammy hijinks underscoring an overenthusiastic local news man's desire to go viral, Brijendra Kala doing his deadpan bit, a criminally underused Vijay Raaz and finally, Raghuvir Yadav shows up too. Only by then Kathal has completely gone bananas.

Kathal has its rustic milieu and fluent chatter down pat, but is confused about the kind of movie it wants to be. It opens with the sequence of detaining a serial offender lured by Mahima's honey trap and is followed by her bumbling senior botching the numbers of his crimes. There's nothing remotely amusing about a rapist put behind bars. But Kathal sees it as an opportunity for humour.

A series like Dahaad addressed the revolting practice of caste discrimination fleetingly but firmly over its course of eight episodes. Kathal brings it up too, either for the sake of a lame joke or cursory revolution.

Satire need to be more than madcap comedy to work. Unless razor-sharp in their wit and clever in their criticism like Peepli [Live], they have little point.

Kathal would work a lot better if it admitted to its social inequities. Instead its preoccupation with misguided messaging and apologetic feminism result in a half-cooked satire.

Kathal streams on Netflix.