Movie Review: 'Bloody Daddy' is a bloody mix of mayhem and daddy issues

Rating: ** ½

Bloody Daddy has an intense and focused Shahid Kapoor playing daddy to a young teenage son who reacts to every effort of the father to reach out with, "Whatever", "Dad, Chill" and whatever jargon kids use to feel cool.

The script itself tries hard to be urbane, cool and a little chic. Almost the entire plot is set in a 7-star hotel owned by a sleazy but subliminally wired to be humane if needed, Ronit Roy, who is as usual first-rate. Watch him closely in the sequence where tries to be sweet to a kidnapped boy. Ronit eclipses all the other talented actors in the room, barring Sanjay Kapoor who is impossible to eclipse as he always stands out, and not in a good way.

The film’s canvas is cluttered with talented actors, mostly male, trying hard to grind their teeth and look sinister while also making every effort to show us they are having fun with fangs. The efforts to be ‘cool’ are constantly shot down by a plot that keeps shooting itself in the foot.

This story of a desperate father trying to get his kidnapped son back in exchange for a huge consignment of cocaine is so keen on being constantly ahead of the audience that after a point the game of catch-me-if-you-can begins to seem tiresome.

Nonetheless, Shahid Kapoor keeps the boat from toppling over. He is nasty when he is required to be. But occasionally his character Sumair surprises us by displaying a sensitive side especially when dealing with the novice bartender Bunty (Vikram Mehra, endearingly naïve) or in the later portions with his son. It is a complex, inherently self-contradictory character who trips over traps he himself lays and ultimately succeeds in swimming against the tides.

The film has some highspeed chase sequences, which are well shot. The canvas and the camerawork are impressively eye-catching. I wonder why the bloody hell Bloody Daddy (what an awful title for a film about a father trying to rescue his son from peril) is playing for free on JioCinema.

Another thing: why is the lovely Diana Penty always cast in underwritten roles? She stands tall, in more ways than one, even when pitched against veterans like Rajeev Khandelwal and Shahid Kapoor. Ah, Khandelwal… nice to see him play wicked with such enthusiasm. Almost every character is trigger-happy as they run around the hotel’s lobby while a lavish wedding goes on.

The constant collision of celebration and violence must have seemed exciting to those who wrote the script. But this story has been done twice before: in French as Sleepless Night and in Tamil as Thongaa Vaanam. Do we really want to watch the second Indian remake of a middling French film?

There is a standing joke in Bloody Daddy about men barging into the ladies’ washroom of a luxury hotel and about a Nepali chef in the pantry of the same hotel innocently helping Sumair pack aata (flour) in packets in place of cocaine.

Cooking and cocaine…well done! It is the cleverest subtext in a film so obsessed with pace that it leaves us breathless.