Movie Name:Blackmail
Critics Rating: 2 / 5
Release Date: April 6, 2018
Director: Abhinay Deo
Genre: Drama/Comedy

Irrfan Khan’s Blackmail got our expectations high right from the time its trailer was dropped. In the two-minute clip, Irrfan was seen running for life in barely any clothes, leaving us wondering about what made him end up like this. But when we found the answers, we were like ‘Oh really?’. Putting it in one line: Abhinav Deo’s madcap affair is different, novel but over-strenuous. As they say, not everything new is amazing!

Blackmail Plot

The story, as the trailer was suggestive enough, is about a middle-class man whose life is thrown into a tizzy when he finds out about his wife’s affair with her former boyfriend. He catches them ‘in the act’ and goes berserk. While an ordinary man would wield a gun and shoot the man in his wife’s bed, point blank. But that’s not what our Dev Kaushal (Irrfan Khan) does. He does something unimaginable to human senses. Dev goes on to the extent of blackmail his wife Reena’s (Kirti Kulhari) boyfriend Ranjit (Arunoday Singh) to meet his own financial debts. He’s nearly successful but the latter turns the table when he starts blackmailing Dev’s wife for money. This triggers off a ‘blackmailing’ chain which drags up to the nth number till the movie ends.

Blackmail Movie Review
We sat down with humongous expectations from Irrfan Khan, who’ll not be seen on the silver screen for a long time due to his health condition. As the film begins, and just five minutes into it, we find our attention faltering, looking for a more interesting subject; the walls, sound of chatter in the air, popcorn or whatever. Though it seems like a fast-paced film, but after watching the film for half an hour, you’ll find that it continues with magnitude but no direction. It’s going nowhere. Dev has a troubled married life, his wife finds solace in some other man who is in turn married to another woman. This whole vicious chain makes the whole movie turn humdrum. If we have to count the number of times we yawned during the course of the movie, we could have reached the exact value of ‘infinity’. A is blackmailing B, B is blackmailing C who in turn is blackmailing A, sorry, what? It’s just like a nightmare for a mathematics student who used to find himself struggling with equations during high school. Sorry, but we have enough calculations in our real life, to find some more in the movies as well.

Coming back to the story, there’s none. Three people are adamant on messing with each other’s life. Their lust for money leads them to a point of no return. In the end, it’s Dev Kaushal who ends up losing almost nothing. Reena loses her loving husband while Ranjit ends up doing something beyond belief.

The acting part - Irrfan Khan doesn't disappoint when it comes to acting. He has given his best, no matter how sluggish the story unfolds. Hand him whatever, the man knows how to weave magic out of thin air. Surprisingly, it was Arunoday Singh who managed to keep us glued to the screen. His notorious antics got us laughing and feeling pity at him at the same time. The actor has proved his mettle many times before too, in Buddha In A Traffic Jam, Jism 2 and Mohenjo Daro. But as Ranjit, he totally had us. His performance was at par with that of Irrfan’s. Enough said.

Kirti Kulhari had little to do in the film, though we expected to see more of her, as all the ruckus was created by her foolish decisions. Divya Dutta followed Kirti Kulhari’s league, showed up very little of herself in few parts of the movie.

To be precise, the film fails a brilliant actor Irrfan Khan, who has weaved the magic on silver screen umpteen times. Honestly, Blackmail is his worst choice of scripts in the recent years. He tried his best to fit in the character of a cheated husband, but what to do when the screenplay is faulty.

Talking about the execution of the story, can you calculate how slowly a tortoise would cover a mile? Yes, you got it. That’s how slow the film was. Audience find themselves shifting their weight on the chair after every 10 minutes. Not that the film is lengthy, but it’s too stretched and overworked. You will wait for it to end, with your gaze settled at the red-coloured ‘EXIT’ written over the doors. That’s where Abhinav Deo has lost as a filmmaker.

A warning for all the Irrfan Khan lovers, you will feel cheated in the end.