Akira Movie Review

Sonakshi Sinha is an eye-catching action star and director-turned-actor Anurag Kashyap evil incarnate in A R Murugadoss’ intriguingly titled Akira. Both pull off their roles with astonishing aplomb.

The film as a whole is, however, patchy. Its facile genre sleights – rogue cops, wronged innocents and bloody confrontations – hit home only sporadically.

Despite pitchforking a kickass female protagonist into the spotlight, and also writing an upright cop role for an actress (Konkona Sen Sharma), Akira does not seem as radical a commercial Hindi film as one might expect it to be.

Hindi movie fans have seen action dramas aplenty about the police-underworld nexus. In Akira, a cynical segment of the police force is itself the underworld.

But, for all its aggressive shots at trying to be different, the film plays out as no more than a crime drama in which an aggrieved protagonist fights tooth and nail against forces that might get away with murder if the former does not intervene.

There is obviously no suggestion in the screenplay that the heroine’s deaf-mute father (Atul Kulkarni in a special appearance) was ever a Kurosawa fan.

Nor does the director’s approach to the supercharged crime drama reveal any stylistic traits that might please those that have been weaned on the Japanese cinema legend’s timeless masterpieces.

To put all speculation at rest, the film informs the audience right at the outset that Akira is a Sanskrit world that means “graceful strength”. It then proceeds to spell out exactly who embodies it.

The heroine of the film is Akira Sharma (Sonakshi Sinha), a college student who is sucked into a violent conflict with four Mumbai policemen spearheaded by a vicious, cocaine-snorting assistant commissioner of police, Govind Rane (Anurag Kashyap).

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