Malayalam director Rosshan Andrews arrives in Hindi cinema with a partial reworking of Mumbai Police, his film from 2013. Deva stars Shahid Kapoor as the titular cop who is a rowdy in uniform. Deva follows his own rulebook, which invites raised eyebrows but is overlooked because of his reputation for standing up to interfering politicians.
Deva’s friends in the police force include his brother-in-law Farhan (Parvessh Rana) and Rohan (Pavail Gulati). When Deva loses his memory in the middle of a sensitive murder investigation, he will need all the help he needs to find out who the killer is.
Style resoundingly trumps substance in Andrews’s first Bollywood outing, which is extraordinarily good-looking but has neither a halfway convincing plot nor engaging characters.
Deva has the dense feel of a graphic novel come to life and the cool air of a French or Italian police drama. Emotions are kept to the minimum, to the extent that Deva’s girlfriend Diya (Pooja Hegde) barely raises an eyebrow when her constable father is grievously injured.
The movie has a seductive matte-finish look by cinematographer Amit Roy, seamless scene-binding by editor A Sreekar Prasad, superbly used locations in Mumbai, and a nicely styled Shahid Kapoor. All Deva needed was a proper story – and an eye on the clock. A movie this lean has no business lingering for 156 minutes.
The dilemma that dogs Deva after his memory loss, which could have been the crux of the movie, is cursorily handled. Despite superb visuals and a blazing Shahid Kapoor, Deva is as cold to the touch as its treatment of weighty themes such as guilt, culpability and redemption is clinical.
