Over a decade ago, three friends witnessed a brutal attack on their buddy. In the present, there is a new crime to deal with. A young woman, the daughter of an influential politician, has died. Mona (Ketaki Narayan) is known to Pramod (Amit Sadh), Vishnu (Jim Sarbh) and Nicky (Anuvab Pal), making it vital for them to hunt down her murderer.
Pune Highway shares its title and the theme of friendship tested by adversity with Rahul D’Cunha’s popular play of the same name. The Hindi film, written and directed by D’Cunha and Bhargava “Bugs” Krishna, is an old-fashioned murder mystery, in which events in the past haunt the present.
Each of the men has a back story complicated by far too much time spent in each other’s company. Excessive familiarity has blinded them to each other’s foibles and secrets, the screenplay suggests. Inspector Pethe (Sudeep Modak) has his work cut out for him, what with a revolving door of suitable suspects, including Vishnu’s ex-wife (Manjiri Phadnis) and Nicholas, who has a tendency to record everything he sees.
The events in the 121-minute Pune Highway move at a decent clip until the needlessly overstretched climax. Among the characters, only the one played by Jim Sarbh and Amit Sadh are of interest. Sarbh is especially sharp in portraying Vishnu’s personal conflicts. Anuvab Pal’s Nicholas is the kind of camera-wielding creep women are warned about, but is instead treated as comic relief.
Pune Highway isn’t always alive to Nicholas’s troubling ways, or the depiction of Mona as a textbook hussy. The film does a competent job of maintaining suspense over the killer’s identity and motives, but doesn’t create compelling enough characters to make the journey entirely engaging.
