Cast: Irrfan Khan, Kirti Kulhari, Arunoday Singh
Director: Abhinay Deo
Rating: 2.5 star (out of 5)
The first warnings the audience gets about Abhinay Deo's Blackmail is a disclaimer before the movie starts, informing us that "plastic dummy fish were used in the gun shot." Intriguingly worded as that statement is, it fails to tell us that these dummy fish were evidently meant also to be the film's audience. This is a hard film for anyone who has ever watched a film before to enjoy, though I shall stick my neck out and wager that plastic dummy fish may even be mildly amused by this film.
The rest of us can only long for a gun shot. To begin with, Blackmail doesn't look like an actual movie. The cinematography is sloppy, the lighting poor, the colours miserable. The overall tackiness is so pronounced that it appears intentional, as if the filmmakers were trying to show us life through the miserable protagonist's bleary eyes, but things stay shoddy even when he isn't on screen. In fact, they get worse, for the dead-end hero is Irrfan Khan, incapable of giving a bad performance. When he isn't around, merely the dummy fish remain.