‘AK Vs AK’ Movie Review: Leave everything and watch this Anil Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap starrer edge-of-the-seat thriller!

Directed By
Vikramaditya Motwane

Produced By
Dipa De Motwane, Andolan Films, David Taghioff, Anurag Kashyap

Cast
Anurag Kashyap, Anil Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Harshvardhan Kapoor, Yogita Bihani, Sucharita Tyagi, Pawan Singh

Bollywood Bubble Rating
What’s It About
A filmmaker (Anurag Kashyap) kidnaps the daughter (Sonam Kapoor) of a movie star (Anil Kapoor), and while the star searches for his daughter the director films the desperate search in real-time for his next blockbuster movie. Will the star be able to search his daughter out? Will the filmmaker get punished for the crime? Or will there be a deadly twist at the end, which you would have never imaged? Well, you’ll have to watch the movie to know that.

What’s Hot
There’s a line in the movie where Anil Kapoor says something to the tune of, “Anil Kapoor 40-saal se star hai aur apne aankhri saans tak star rahega,” and after you see his performance in ‘AK Vs AK’ you’re going to believe every word of that. Anil Kapoor was, is and will be a star till his last breath. What a cracker of a performance! Anil Kapoor is indeed in top form, and every nuance in his performance makes you want to believe that it’s a true story. He bleeds, he cries, he longs for his family and all of that, maybe done for the film, looks absolutely real. At one juncture Anil Kapoor reminds Anurag Kashyap that he has 6 Filmfare Awards and not 4, after seeing this film, it sure feels like he has a great chance of increasing the Filmfare award count to 7. Anil Kapoor’s performance will leave you in awe!

Anurag Kashyap, my man! Oh-my-god, you’re damn good as an actor. Menacing, antagonising and that Joker-style killer facial expressions surely make Anurag Kashyap one of the best negative characters that I’ve seen in a really long time. His eyes speak! He doesn’t have to do too much, but it’s his facial expressions that make the kill in every shot. Surely, I hope to see more of Anurag Kashyap onscreen.

A special mention to the way Harshvardhan Kapoor’s character was written up. In one of the scenes when junior Kapoor sees dad Anil enter home with Anurag Kashyap, one of the finest filmmakers in India, Harshvardhan does everything possible in his capability make sure he gets noticed by Kashyap. While talking about a scene, he practically gives out a whole audition about how the character would perform onscreen, and kudos to Vikramaditya Motwane to keep the thing in its entirety as raw as possible. Also, at the end of the scene, you see Harshvardhan commenting slyly on how he loves Kashyap as he’s not like Motwane, who screwed him over with the 2018 film ‘Bhavesh Joshi’. Quite a bold move by a director to keep such a line in his own movie.

The awesome screenplay and writing of the film by Vikramaditya Motwane and Avinash Sampath makes you regain your trust in Indian cinema and make you believe that yes if we want, we too can come up with content that’s edgy and has a thrill factor that can keep you on the tenterhooks till the last frame of the movie. The story may be quite similar to Hollywood franchises like Liam Neeson’s ‘Taken’, but it’s the new approach that’s given to the story of making it a candid camera and a reality show sort-of filming which makes you walk, run, cry, get hurt with the central characters.

A lot of applause for the same for the director Vikramaditya Motwane to make sure that the audience keeps feeling a sense of just running side by side with the central characters of the movie throughout! I say this many a times in thriller films that the end was predictable, but by god, this one takes the cake, as you hardly are able to fathom what’s coming your way till the final climax starts. You’re left clueless for almost 95-minutes of the film and Vikramaditya Motwane needs a huge round of applause for making sure that thrill factor remains intact.

Needless to say that Anurag Kashyap has done fantastic work with the dialogues. Bringing in popular dialogues from previous hit films of his and of Anil Kapoor just to make the characters more relatable by the viewer is a masterpiece thinking.

In such films, you would usually end up getting a headache at the end due to the running shots taken by the camera team, but that’s not the case with ‘AK Vs AK’. The cinematography by Swapnil Sonawane is brilliant and it makes sure that even if the lead characters get cut from the frame once in a while, it doesn’t end up giving a bad taste to the viewer.

Lastly, the crisp editing by Bunty Bhansali makes the 108-minute presentation worth every second of yours.

What’s Not
There’s hardly much wrong with the film, excepting the fact that the hard-coded subtitles have a lapse and mismatched timing. That itself is enough to irritate you throughout the film. Probably that could have been an error in the preview files sent by the makers and Netflix for the media, and possibly could be rectified before the film gets released officially on the platform.

Verdict
Now that the year is coming to an end in another week’s time, I can openly say that ‘AK Vs AK’ is possibly the best Hindi language film that I’ve seen and reviewed this year. Anil Kapoor, you’ll always be the star. Anurag Kashyap, you can play the Indian version of ‘Joker’ any day and people will throng the theatres to see your madcap crazy side. Had the hard-coded subtitles not spoilt the fun of the viewing, this was easily the best thriller to have come up in a really long time. I am going with 4 stars. It’s a MUST WATCH.

Watch Trailer

Also Read: ‘Torbaaz’ Movie Review: Sanjay Dutt’s story of war-torn refugee kids is a snooze-fest

Prateek Sur

Born a Movie Buff, working as a Film Critique and enjoying life as a Bollywood Reporter.

Email: editor@bollywoodbubble.com Phone: +91 8355910465