Rocky Handsome
Director: Nishikant Kamat
Cast: John Abraham, Nishikant Kamat, Shruti Haasan, Diya Chalwad
One star
With Rocky Handsome, director Nishikant Kamat completes a hat-trick of poorly made remakes that fail spectacularly to do justice to the originals.
A remake of the 2010 South Korean hit The Man From Nowhere, Rocky Handsome is set in Goa, where Kabir Ahlawat (John Abraham) — also known or Rocky Handsome is a pawnshop owner after retiring from his previous life a highly trained assassin.
Mourning the death of his pregnant wife, Rukshida (Shruti Haasan), he develops a bond with his eight-year-old neighbour Nayomi (Diya Chalwad) and her mother Anna (Nathalia Kaur), a stripper with her own problems.
Ahlawat’s quiet life is interrupted and his lethal skills are resurrected when Anna and Nayomi get involved in a drug and organ-trafficking racket run by brothers Kevin (Nishikant Kamat) and Luke (Teddy Maurya).
Rocky Handsome has a lazy script but for a brawny action film that can be excused. What's unforgivable is action sequences being diluted of their potential to make way for ill-timed drama.
But what truly descends Rocky Handsome from bad to unbearable is the ham fisted acting. There’s little asked of Abraham — bar a few scattered moments of emotion amid all the flexing of muscles and punch ups — and he still manages to botch it.
Wooden and robotic, this is a new career low for the star. Meanwhile, child actor Chalwad is insufferable, but that could just be the age-inappropriate dialogues she’s been saddled with.
The biggest culprit here is Kamat, the director took a ready-made successful script, full of eye popping violence (the original is a feast for gore fans) and turned it into a garbled mess of needless drama and bad acting — by that, I mean really, really bad acting.
artslife@thenational.ae