In Visfot, accidents are simply waiting to happen. Chance and cruel coincidence combine to breathless effect in Kookie Gulati’s official Hindi remake of the Venezuelan hit Rock, Paper, Scissors (2012).
Set in Mumbai, the movie is out on JioCinema. The moving finger has started behaving like a seismometer during a tsunami even before call taxi driver Shoeb’s path crosses with airline pilot Akash.
Dragged into the travails of his acquaintance Manya (Nachiket Purnapatre) soon after, Shoeb (Fardeen Khan) and his girlfriend Lucky (Krystle D’Souza) find themselves saddled with Akash’s son Paddy (Prithviraj Sarnaik).
The affluent Akash (Riteish Deshmukh) and his estranged wife Tara (Priya Bapat) stop their bickering long enough to try to retrieve their child. Unfortunately for all concerned, gangland queen Acid Tai (Seema Biwas) and a pair of corrupt cops are keen on prolonging the situation.
The explosion suggested by the film’s title is actually a series of minor blasts. Both Shoeb and Akash are seconds away from imploding, Akash more than Shoeb, since he is unused to the instability that awaits him.
Visfot doesn’t expand on the consequences of two economic classes and worlds colliding head-on. The rot that characterises the Caracas setting in Rock, Paper, Scissors is merely hinted at in Visfot. Perhaps the film’s director and writers Abbas Dalal and Hussein Dalal are relying on Mumbai’s storied reputation for anytime-anywhere mayhem.
Stripped of layering, the 130-minute Visfot is an efficient and worthwhile thriller, nail-biting when it needs to be and with enough emotion to make the characters come alive. There are moments when both tracks threaten to tip over into hysteria. But the need to keep things moving over a plot that is set over a single day steadies the narrative.
A well-picked cast delivers the goods, turning out the kind of believable performances needed to hard-sell some of the more implausible plot turns. Riteish Deshmukh, Priya Bapat and Krystle D’Souza are each solid – the women especially benefitting from well-etched characters. The surprise package is Fardeen Khan, who amply overcomes his recent disastrous turn in Heermandi.
Khan ably portrays Shoeb as a decent bloke, a dutiful son to his ailing mother (Sheeba Chadha) and a loving boyfriend to Lucky. This section of the movie is altogether more controlled and compelling than the dialled-up catfights between Akash and Tara.
