Sankat City: Movie Review

Cast: Kay Kay Menon, Rimmi, Anupam Kher
Director: Pankaj Advani
Rating:
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Falling in the same genre of crime-comedy capers like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or the more recent Hindi film 99, Sankat City is a dark comedy with all grey characters in the city of Mumbai. Not really a roller-coaster ride, this one is more of a merry-go-round drive with several characters circularly connected to each other through multiple money rotations.Thankfully it���s not slapstick but follows a crazy-yet-credible storyline.
Guru (Kay Kay Menon) is a small-time car-thief who gets a facelift to his stolen automobiles through Ganpat (Dilip Prabhavalkar) before selling them off. On stealing a swanky Mercedes, Guru chances upon a crore of rupees in the vehicle but little does he know that the car belongs to Faujdar (Anupam Kher). Before he could return the riches to Faujdar, Ganpat loses his memory. Only he knows where the currency is concealed.
With only 3 days to return the money, Guru stumbles upon Mona (Rimmi), his ex-partner in crime. Together they plan a new con, win a couple of crores and continue to lose, gain, gamble the moolah through frequent twists and turns in the plot.
There are too many characters, too many plots, too many sub-plots, too many twists which fortunately sums up for too much fun. Multiple characters are introduced in the initial reels and are concurrently correlated with other characters. The writing by Pankaj Advani is wacky, witty, weird and wild. The pacing is too fast to breathe, gasp, feel, absorb, react or relate. Despite that the humour never gets farcical and the screenplay doesn���t muddle up into confusion and commotion.
Bollywood formulas like the memory loss syndrome or estranged childhood brothers reuniting after years are employed to spoofy effect over conventional clich��s. One doesn���t mind the continual coincidences in the narrative as long as it keeps the story kicking ahead. Cinematography by Chirantan Das aptly captures the hasty and troubled mood of the Mumbai city with a grainy effect in several frames. Ranjit Barot���s musical score is thankfully restricted only to the background and the screenplay mercifully doesn���t branch out to any romantic track. The Rimi-Kay Kay chemistry doesn���t incline towards a blatant love liaison, which could have diluted the proceedings.
Debutante director Pankaj Advani emerges as a good storyteller and manages to bind you with his multiple character-driven plot and multi-dimensional narrative. By the end, you realize that every character is integrally interlinked to the story and exploited effectively. The south Indian item number spoof is hilarious.
Kay Kay Menon is absolutely comfortable with comedy and his spontaneity adds to his natural act. Rimmi neither gets too saucy nor too bubbly like usual Bollywood con-women. Smoothly switching her speech from Hindi to an impromptu Bengali, Rimmi is perfectly poised in her act. Also Anupam Kher���s negative role is neither characterized as a complete comic caricature or an intense villain. He is a more credible character, somewhere in between the two and restores his hissing accent from Amitabh Bachchan���s Hum. Thankfully you are saved from Chunky Pandey���s hamming since his character is terminated quite early and the duplicate emerges pretty late. Amongst the other characters, Dilip Prabhawalkar, Yashpal Sharma, Manoj Pahwa and Virendra Saxena are effective.
Do visit Sankat City for some unadulterated entertainment.
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