One Day: Justice Delivered Review: 0 Thrills

Slipshod direction and listless story produce a superfluous drama about how a judge turns into a murderer, notes Prasanna D Zore.

A sham of a thriller from start to end, director Ashok Nanda's One Day: Justice Delivered spoils your day for sure.

Like all thrillers based on real events, One Day: Justice Delivered too claims that it is a work of fiction based on real events.

The story revolves around A judge-turned-vigilante-justice-dispenser, Judge Tyagi, played with conviction and some bone-chilling coldness (the suave judge slices apples and chomps on them as he plans to rip apart or singe the corrupt) by Anupam Kher.

But Nanda's slipshod direction and Alaukik Rahi's listless story seriously dent Kher's efforts to infuse life into the 124-minute drama that is only superfluous in its treatment of how greed and corruption turn a duty-bound judge into a diabolical vigilante.

Nanda's repetitive use of flashbacks to give the viewers a sense of how those being dealt deadly blows by a cold-blooded retired judge are too predictable to arouse any sense of thrill.

Nanda's narration, then, fails to justify why a family-loving, amiable judge takes upon himself after retirement to right the wrongs he had helplessly perpetrated while delivering judgements.

Nanda uses the pain of the victims's families to highlight the turmoil that Kher's Judge Tyagi undergoes every time he lets the wrongdoer go scot free for want of evidence.

Like a mother, Zarina Wahab, slapping Tyagi for being sold out to doctors whose greed results in her son's death.

Or, the father of a girl, who commits suicide after being unable to face the ignominy that comes the way of a girl filmed during her honeymoon, telling Kher that he too has a daughter who could also meet the same fate.

As one struggles to get around Judge Tyagi's Jekyll and Hyde-type transitions, Nanda springs a glamorous cop, Esha Gupta, singing and seducing wanted criminals upon you, out of nowhere.

In his attempt to add colourful layers to Gupta's character, he makes this Haryanvi-speaking-special-crime-branch-officer-from-Kolkata-to-Ranchi act tough with criminals and politicians and we all but forget that One Day: Justice Delivered is kind of a whodunit.

After Gupta enters the scene, the film loses its plot completely, even as she gets hot (no pun intended) on the trail of the person behind the missing VIPs from Ranchi along with Inspector Sharma (Kumud Mishra), betraying a 'perennially constipated' smirk.

Apart from the climax, which does give the viewers some passing moments to feel good about this movie, Inderjit Bansel and Arvind Singh's cinematic camerawork makes sunrise in Ranchi look fantastic as they pan through the town aerially.

The music by Joy-Anjan, Rishi Singh and Vikrant-Parijat is noise, noise and more noise.

One Day: Justice Delivered attempts to ride on the able shoulders of Kher's Judge Tyagi, but only succeeds in burdening them with the weight of Nanda's limpid narrative.

Perhaps that explains why Judge Tyagi moves around with drooping shoulders throughout the film.