I took two days to watch the 2020 Anil Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap-starrer ‘AK VS AK’.
The first attempt ended within 20 minutes for my husband and me, thanks to an exciting start which petered out just as fast. It was slow and pretentious as fuck (AF) and if “fuck” made you take a pause, then this movie is definitely not for you.
I forced myself to give a chance to the movie – hope always reigns supreme. Surprisingly, it did get more interesting but story and pace swung wildly between entertaining and extreme depths of boredom. Disclaimer: We fast-forwarded. A LOT.
The plot is pretty simple, even if far-fetched – Anil Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap play themselves in the movie and are supposed to hate each other. The film opens with the two of them having a public spat that’s hilariously blown up by the media. Anurag Kashyap then decides on getting back at the older actor. So he kidnaps his daughter Sonam Kapoor and decides to shoot a movie in real-time and blackmails Anil Kapoor into finding his daughter while the cameras keep rolling.
While the idea might have sounded great on paper, it gets choppy on screen. Far from being ‘raw’/’real’, a lot of scenes come off as insincere. The makers try too hard to be cool. There is an almost 20 minute long chase sequence of Anil Kapoor running around Mumbai, which was just so unnecessary. Anurag Kashyap should perhaps stick to directing, because his acting is sloppy; he just comes across as a smug schmuck. Although Anil really gets into the role and is the saving grace of this film. But putting the burden of carrying an entire film on just one actor is sort of unfair. It’s like asking two people to move a heavy corpse, but only one of them does it, while the other one smokes circles in a corner. Anurag Kashyap is the smoker. Sonam Kapoor had some three minute screen-time and she managed to be hammy even in those few seconds.
Anil Kapoor deserves better.
The Sonam Kapoor line cracked me up!
I was skeptical about the movie right from the time the trailer came out, although the reviews and the novel marketing strategy somehow convinced me to give it a shot. And unfortunately, my initial hunch was right. The movie drags, limps and crawls for the majority of its runtime.
The only saving grace is Anil Kapoor and the scene featuring him going all out on stage, dancing to a sea of people in the ground. That man deserves accolades for taking this up. If only Motwane had done better justice to the idea.
P.S. The blog has a new identity! Love this one 😀
Yeah, even I wasn’t very sure about watching the film, but a few friends liked it and recommended it, even though they warned that it was ‘slow’. But you are right about Anil Kapoor, he was the soul of the film, couldn’t have suffered through it if it weren’t for him.
And glad you like the blog overhaul! 😀 🙂