{"id":2375,"date":"2016-03-31T00:48:15","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T19:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/blackmail-movie-review-irrfan-khan-abhinay-deo-delhi-belly\/"},"modified":"2016-03-31T00:48:15","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T19:18:15","slug":"blackmail-movie-review-irrfan-khan-abhinay-deo-delhi-belly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=2375","title":{"rendered":"Blackmail and the Monster in Every Aam Aadmi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T<\/span><\/p><\/div>

here\u2019s an important scene in Abhinay Deo\u2019s Blackmail<\/em> that sets the tone for the rest of the messy revenge<\/a> comedy suffering from an acute Delhi Belly<\/em> hangover. While drinking after work at a neon-lit dive bar<\/a>, a lascivious Anand sits stupefied after listening to his colleague Dev\u2019s (Irrfan Khan<\/a>) plan of blackmailing his wife\u2019s lover instead of confronting her about cheating on him. As Dev disguises his risky revenge plot as a joke, Anand foreshadows the former\u2019s fate by warning him that in the movies, it\u2019s normal people like Dev who eventually turn out to be serial killers<\/a>.\n\nDev\u2019s immediate reaction to his colleague\u2019s gloomy prognosis is unbridled laughter. After all, how much havoc can a meek, middle-aged, and married employee of a toilet <\/a>paper manufacturing company like him cause? Turns out, a lot, if the bloated 139-minute-long runtime of Blackmail<\/em> is any indication.\n\nBut at the heart of it remains an interesting premise \u2013 the monster within ordinary people and how little it takes to unleash him.\n\nIn the film, Dev sets off on a series of misadventures that cause a callous loss of lives, relationships<\/a>, company profits, and most importantly, trust. Madness is not be the preserve of the deranged, Blackmail<\/em> attempts to tell us through the actions of its perfectly capable, \u201cnormal\u201d protagonists. Dev, for instance, is the quintessential loser, crumbling silently under the pressure of multiple EMIs, an unfairly low salary, and a dead marriage<\/a> with a wife who says that he \u201clooks like a husband\u201d. Living in a crampy, carton-sized quarter with his wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari wasted in a thankless role, yet again), Dev is one of those guys who seems like he is born with a coating of mediocrity and destined to get lost in the crowd.\n\n

In this scenario, the comical empathy for Dev ensures that Blackmail comes across as an unconvincing black comedy bent on milking the Delhi Belly success formula. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nAnd, yet it doesn\u2019t take this harmless man more than a few hours to reveal his inherently dark side and adopt the identity of a blackmailer, the heartlessness of a hardened criminal, and the indifference of a murderer.\n\nEven though Deo tries hard to justify Dev\u2019s criminal bent of mind as a means for survival of the \u201caam aadmi\u201d<\/a>, a victim of his own circumstances (he blackmails for a ransom as meagre as \u20b91 lakh only to pay off his debts), his amoral tendencies are actually an extension of his personality. Just because he is a mature adult doesn\u2019t mean he is incapable of being tempted by greed and resorting to utter evil. All that Dev\u2019s calculated normalcy needed was an able nemesis and his wife\u2019s infidelity affords him precisely that opportunity.\n\nAs he continues committing crime after crime, coercing multiple ransoms from his wife and her lover, stealing photos of his boss\u2019s and colleague\u2019s wives to pleasure himself in the bathroom, and framing innocent people, it is clear that Dev\u2019s controlled calmness can only be the work of a cold-blooded killer.\n\nBy showing how easy it is for perfectly sane individuals to willingly prey on the fear of others, Blackmail<\/em> taps something very accurate about the monsters that reside in all of us; a part that we\u2019re happy to deny. But one that is accomplished enough to cause widespread damage. Like Dev, the film\u2019s other protagonists fall prey to their greed \u2013 Reena\u2019s lover Ranjit (Arunoday Singh in top form) blackmails her in return, while Dev\u2019s newest colleague Prabha also doesn\u2019t shy away from demanding her share of the pie.\n\nIn this scenario, the comical empathy for Dev ensures that Blackmail<\/em> comes across as an unconvincing black comedy bent on milking the Delhi Belly<\/em> success formula (there\u2019s even a senior called Boss DK). Instead of empathy, all the film needed was a little more clarity \u2013 it needed to be a bit more brutal in its assessment of its evil lead.\n\nIt could have been an unflinching portrait of an individual\u2019s breakdown into his inner monster like Nikki Singh\u2019s (Akshay Oberoi) in Gurgaon<\/em><\/a> when he watches silently as his adopted sister drowns in front of him. Or, it could have assumed the grammar of Anurag Kashyap\u2019s Ugly<\/em>, where redemption is a road banned for its protagonists. But most importantly, Blackmail<\/em> could have been a film that shows the epicentre of repressed rage that makes vindictive monsters out of the best of us.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Irrfan Khan’s Blackmail taps something very accurate about the monsters that reside in all of us \u2013 a part that we\u2019re happy to deny. All that the film needed, was to be a bit more brutal in the assessment of its evil lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":2376,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3114],"tags":[4793,3841,4207,4010,4794,4795,3843,4796,1787,4797],"class_list":["post-2375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bollywood","tag-abhinay-deo","tag-akshat-verma","tag-arunoday-singh","tag-black-comedy","tag-blackmail","tag-blackmail-movie-review","tag-delhi-belly","tag-dk-boss","tag-irrfan-khan","tag-kirti-kulhari"],"yoast_head":"\nBlackmail and the Monster in Every Aam Aadmi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Irrfan Khan's Blackmail taps something very accurate about the monsters that reside in all of us \u2013 a part that we\u2019re happy to deny. 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