Kennedy Review: Rahul Bhat In His Best Act, Anurag Kashyap Not Quite

An insomniac former police officer, “officially dead” for six years, prowls the streets of Mumbai in the still of the night, killing people in cold blood. Kennedy is his assumed name. The reason, like his deadly deeds, is shrouded in mystery.

The taciturn, brooding assassin is out there ostensibly to clean up the mess that politicians, industrialists and gangsters have created. But, in reality, he is the Mumbai police commissioner's secret loose cannon and hatchet man.

That apart, the man, played with coiled-up intensity by a beefed-up Rahul Bhat, has his own reason for being the way he is. He has a score to settle with an elusive crime lord responsible for tearing him away from his family.

The taut, niftily executed neo-noir thriller premiered in Cannes in 2023 before travelling to Sydney, Reykjavik, El Gouna and Mumbai, besides sundry fantastic and horror film festivals.

And then, like its titular anti-hero, it went missing from the radar for nearly three years but without ever vanishing from conversations around Anurag Kashyap films.

Kennedy has finally landed on Zee5. The film possesses a propulsive core that drives home the horrors of a broken urban policing system the way that Ugly (also featuring Rahul Bhat) did.

Playing out during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 as the city is beginning to open up post-lockdown, the film follows a burly and bearded Uday Shetty, alias Kennedy, over a period of five nights.

The assassin drives a cab for an app-based service while carrying out orders from the city's police chief, Rasheed Khan (Mohit Takalkar), who has paid a hefty sum to buy the position and now needs to recover the money.

Time isn't on his side.

Uday, silent and masked, is a virus let loose. His style is unfussy. He betrays no emotions except when memories of a tragic 2014 incident that led to a separation from his wife (Megha Burman) and daughter (Haripriya Manish Lodhia) come back to haunt him.

Anurag Kashyap's script captures the conundrum of a corrosive man who thrives on his transgressions. His stony visage when he twists a knife into a victim or pulls the trigger to kill without remorse is chilling, a mirror to a crazed, twisted mind impervious to pity or moderation.

Kennedy has a runtime of two and a half hours but thanks to Kashyap's no-flab screenplay the film hurtles along at a fair clip.

Uday Shetty's acts inevitably trigger chaos but it is all in a night's work. The sociopath revels in spilling blood until he begins to teeter on the edge of a desire to reclaim what he has lost on the personal front.

Uday Shetty is not the sort of man one would want to run into in a dark alleyway but in the compelling character study that Kashyap weaves around him, this deviant, like all deviants, exudes hard-to-resist magnetism.

He exists in a moral vacuum that allows him to go about his business without batting an eyelid. But while his heart, life and world are all dangerously dark places where evil thoughts and acts have a free run, a sense of guilt is never easy to shrug off.

The prospects of comeuppance are reflected in surreal scenes in which the men he eliminates lurk around to prick his conscience. But can the man who has reached a point of no return drag himself out of the quagmire he has sunk into?

The most intriguing aspect of the character is that no matter how unflappable he is and how apologetic he is about his sadistic streak, he is essentially a victim of fate, a puppet on a string.

His murderous attacks on his targets, some chosen, some random, are acts of a hitman who operates unhindered beyond the pale of the law but is himself reeling from the blows that his life and profession have dealt him.

Uday Shetty is far more interesting than anybody else around him and that includes Charlie (Sunny Leone), who he bumps into in an elevator after a kill that turns out to be far messier than it appears to be at first flush.

Uday Shetty is nothing like a regular Hindi movie policeman who is aware of the line separating the ethical and the undesirable, but he is certainly not the only one to blame for the shocking lawlessness on the streets of the metropolis.

Hard-edged poetry runs like a thread through Kennedy. Aamir Aziz (who also appears on the screen as a nightclub singer) recites his own poems that, through their provocative pessimism, underscore the void that Kennedy inhabits.

A William Wordsworth line – “We poets in our youth begin in gladness/But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness” – come in handy for setting the tone for acts of startling violence by a man grappling with psychosis.

Kennedy showcases (without glorifying) a lonesome maniac who seems to kill to express himself.

The songs (written, composed and performed by Aamir Aziz and Boyblanck), the poems and the conversations in the backseat of the protagonist's taxi verbalise questions about crime, culpability and control over the nation's resources (with Varun Grover in a PPE suit contributing his mite in one sequence).

Kennedy slips up a bit with regard to the political realities that it alludes to in that it does not dive deep enough. But by giving us a central character who is both fascinating and befuddling, thanks to the power that Rahul Bhat lends to it, the film offsets the occasional lack of depth.

Sunny Leone's giggles and guffaws are not only the defining trait of the character she plays but they also add to the surround sound in an ambience where an air of gloom hangs heavy.

Mohit Takalkar, Shrikant Yadav (as a serving police sub-inspector who works alongside the hero) and Megha Burman also stand out.

Sylvester Fonseca's cinematography – the entire film is shot at night – is absolutely terrific. The camera actualises the line of a song in the film – andhe kaali raat mein andheraa saaf dikhta hain – and imparts a deep translucence to both light and shadow.

Anurag Kashyap may not be at his very best in Kennedy but Rahul Bhat definitely is. The actor has never been better.