Blackout

Under the garb of being a dark comedy, Blackout falls flat on its face and ends up being nothing more than a mindless 2-hours-2-minutes long film. A dull screenplay and a meandering storyline are just the icing on top. Blackout is filled with a slew of one-dimensional characters—a crime reporter, a dead boy, a disloyal friend, a disgraced politician, a corrupt cop, a vengeful MLA, a cheating wife, two weird pickpockets, a go-better detective, a mystery woman, and a poetic drunkard. A brilliant Vikrant feels wasted in a movie like this. He puts all his might behind the character, but even he can’t salvage this. Despite the potential, the movie is chaotic, loud, and humourless.

The decision to keep a huge distance between Lenny and his intended retirement plan has its share of crackpot moments. Massey, Grover, Sonawane and Ghadge are up for more zaniness than the movie can dream up. But without much to go on beyond the imperative to keep Lenny in a permanent state of harassment, Blackout soon runs out of road. Flashbacks with time stamps on them supply the back stories to the characters. But the movie is watching the clock as seriously as Lenny is proving his crime reporter credentials. The 122-minute film is set over a single night that seems like several compressed nights. Like the short-form videos in which Thak and Thok specialise, Blackout could be diced into a handful of entertaining scenes, no more, and no less.

It looks as if the casting was done after watching Vikrant Massey and Anant Vijay Joshi play well with each other in ‘12th Fail’. Here, both are given a few random scenes together, but then the whole thing is so determinedly random that it’s almost as if the writers have sworn off any logic.