Looop Lapeta Review – Slows Down Before The Loop Begins

By Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

Aaakash Bhatia and team pick give interesting desi touches to the 1998 German time-loop thriller ‘Run Lola Run’ in the 2022 Netflix remake “Looop Lapeta”, but is that enough? Tapsi Pannu plays athlete Savi, who has to save her ‘useless boyfriend’ Satya (Tahir Raj Bhasin) from getting killed by his boss for bungling up a major money deal. Luckily for her, just when things get out of hand, she gets a miraculous second chance.

One of the first things that hit you as a viewer is the camera-work, it keeps moving a lot, and is probably supposed to be ‘artsy’, but is annoying. Had they shaken it a little more, viewers would faint from a dizzying spell. And the setting up to the big time-loop takes too long, it comes at a point where you’d expect the film to be almost over, but in an unpleasant surprise – you realize almost 3/4ths of the story is still left!

Okay, let’s talk actors. Tapsi Pannu looks convincing as the athlete Savi, she is fit AF, all the training for ‘Rashmi Rocket’ has come in handy for this film. Tahir Raj Bhasin as Satya, a pothead who loves gambling, reminds one of Uday Chopra from ‘Dhoom’ because of the way he is styled, and well, because of his silly character too. However, to his credit, Bhasin nails his part as the clueless but cute man-child. K.C. Shankar gets to play Savi’s widower dad Atul Borkar and has a refreshingly progressive part.

The pace of the film is all over the place, in most movies you either have a strong first-half or second-half, in ‘Loop Lapeta’, the scenes keep flitting between amusing, absurd and drab. There’s a sub-plot about two dumb brothers Appu-Jhappu plotting a robbery which was largely irritating, with juvenile jokes that only kids would find funny. But this movie has a 16+ rating. Oh, and the brothers seemed straight out of the popular 5-star chocolate’s ‘Ramesh-Suresh’ ad. That duo is bearable in a 10-second-ad, repeating that formula for a long feature was a bad idea.

In-fact, throughout the film, makers either intentionally or unwittingly parody a lot of famous scenes/characters. There was another annoying sub-plot about a woman who is set to get married to a random dude instead of her boyfriend. She gives a impassioned monologue about her quandary, like Kartik Aryan from ‘Pyaar Ka Punchanama’, but it’s not entertaining. A nice little original element was how the makers draw a parallel to Savi’s life with an Indian mythological story, so viewers get a quick modern re-telling of a ‘Amar Chitra Katha’.

The run-time could’ve been chopped off by at-least 20-25 minutes and ‘Loop Lapeta’ could’ve been a fantastic thriller. But instead we get repetitive montages of Savi & Satya’s cutesy couple moments show in flashbacks, and a lot of slow useless sequences that are supposed to be funny, but only serve to drag the pace further down. One of the dominant themes of the story is how a lot of things in life are inter-connected, small actions by Savi change her life drastically. To drive home the point of this ‘butterfly effect’, there is a literal gigantic shiny butterfly (too evidently fake) that makes a cameo in the movie, which was plain ridiculous.

“Looop Lapeta” will not impress movie enthusiasts who are used to watching experimental thrillers. I remember seeing the trailer for the first time and it reminded me of the super fun 2020 time-loop romantic comedy “Palm Springs“. The 2022 flick kind of pales in comparison as far as both the romance and comedy factors are concerned. It’s a 5/10 from me.