The much-awaited good vs evil action stand-off in Double iSmart arrives near interval point, with Shankar (Ram Pothineni) and Big Bull (Sanjay Dutt) facing each other at a dockyard. It’s not an ordinary confrontation, though, for there is an event from their past that connects the two. It’s a moment where Shankar could have emerged out of the conventional hero prototype, rising to a figure whose victory also signifies an emotional triumph. But Double iSmart has no ambitions to be that film.
Like the first part of the franchise, it’s the outlandish sci-fi concept of memory transfer at play here. Believability is not a key element here, and the film is quite clear in its tone. Unfortunately, it’s also unbridled in its misogynistic humour, leaving a terrible taste in the mouth. The dialogues are crude, the visuals are suggestive— and it feels like a never-ending cycle. The jokes about women as sexual conquests are relentless. When a villain’s associate introduces herself (her name is Bentley), the hero replies, ‘the same kind rich men like to ride?’ Jannat (Kavya Thapar) is compared to everything from a curvy fruit to milk-solids. Even when the villain talks about his distress, he recalls his inability to perform sexually, despite having call-girls at his disposal.
At one point, the hero compares a couple of passersby women to processed food, saying he wants to try ‘organic,’ to which his sidekick suggests he try a ‘watermelon.’ If it reads icky, trust me, it’s much worse on execution. The first half is strung together with a handful of these jokes, and plenty of focus on Kavya Thapar, captured through voyeuristic camera angles. Ram and Kavya share interesting chemistry, particularly in the song sequences, but these stretches are transient distractions at best.
There are brief moments where the actioner looks promising in delivering emotion. When Shankar first realises what Big Bull did to him, his immediate fear is of losing all memories of his mother. Similarly, when a ‘rebooted’ Shankar talks about seeing himself as both the victim and killer, it’s a potent moment for exploring the complexity of his situation. Story-wise, the film takes far too long to raise the stakes, and then fails to capitalise on it while inching towards the final act.
There is also a half-baked track thrown in, about the bad guys instigating a civil war just so more guns can be sold among malleable public. Everytime the film tries to take itself seriously, it falls flat on its face. This feeling is evident in the climactic sequence where the makers go overboard with their use of religious iconography. The writers also resorts to using ‘the big twist’ in the finale, but like in case of most recent Telugu films, it comes off as strained, especially because it undoes a lot of the emotional build-up created earlier, about the protagonist’s motivations.
During the hero-establishing song ‘Steppa Maar’, there is an attractive shot with Shankar smoking a cigarette, where its smokey reflection is caught in Ram’s shades. There is no doubt this film is proud of its hyper-masculine swag, and honestly, there’s no harm in having some campy fun with a movie that’s purely interested in the adrenaline rush of it all. At the same time, Double iSmart is a movie that defines its masculinity by how much it can ‘otherise’ the women. Nothing else explains the ‘comedy track’ around a tribal man (Ali) who lands in the city, and wreaks havoc with his primal behaviour (including seducing city-girls with tantrik sex). Seeing this track unfold renders you numb. “There’s no way the makers weren’t aware of its problems while writing and shooting this,” you think to yourself, now concerned about the thought-process of the team at work.
It’s a take-it-or-leave-it energy that Puri Jagannadh displays here, in Double iSmart. Well, I wish I could go back in time and leave it.
Cast: Ram Pothineni, Sanjay Dutt, Kavya Thapar, Makarand Deshpande, Bani J
Director: Puri Jagannadh
Rating: 1.5/5 stars