REVIEW: SANAK

Producer- Vipul Amrutlal Shah

Director-Kanishk Varma

Star Cast- Vidyut Jamwal, Rukmani Maitra, Neha Dhupia, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Kiran Karmarkar

Genre- Thriller

Platform- Disney Plus Hotstar

All Action & Gory Minus Plot!

Rating- ***1/2

Jyothi Venkatesh

Set in Mumbai, the story unfolds in a hospital that is under siege, where Vivaan Ahuja’s (Vidyut Jammwal) wife Anshika (Rukmini Maitra) is undergoing a treatment for a heart ailment and is on the verge of returning home when calamity strikes in the form of a group of hoodlums headed by Saju Solanki (Chandan Roy Sanyal) and his band of skilled fighters who have taken all the people in the hospital as hostages and both are trapped.

How Vivaan manages to rescue Anshika and other hostages from the dangerous hoodlums’ forms the crux of the plot.

The USP of this film, like those of Jammwal's previous works, needless to mention, is its high octave action.

With his power-packed action moves, he is once again a one-man army attempting to control the situation and save everyone.

In comparison to the terrorists, Jammwal has been given a lot of screen time to perform stunts, and he scores in every action scene and the entire credit for the adrenalin eliciting fight sequences ought to go to Vidyut as well as Andy Long Nguyen, the action director who is also a trained martial arts fighter.

The viewers won't even get the time to blink throughout the combat sequences, especially the one in the physiotherapy room.

It should also be said however that Vidyut who seems to get stereotyped in similar kinds of roles in film after film, fails to emote as an actor while Rukmini Maitra is very good as Anshika.

Though Neha Dhupia as lady inspector Jayati Bhargav, has a very limited one dimensional role to play,she does her job with a lot of finesse and does succeed in making her presence felt.

Chandan Roy Sanyal plays Saju Solanki, the merciless mastermind behind the siege with convincing logic while commanding a team of supposedly highly skilled soldiers from around the world.

Kiran Karmarkar as the corrupt mastermind in high government cadres has been grossly wasted in a role which lacks any merit at all.

Writer Ashish Prakash Varma has not devoted enough time to develop a meatier screenplay and seems to have put all his eggs in one basket (Read Vidyut Jammwal) and director Kanishk Varma looks like has been solely motivated by the John McTiernan-directed Die Hard films that spawned a franchise, not so long ago.

Though Vivaan is an impressive one-man army, who almost single-handedly saves the day as a civilian, one hopes that like Die Hard, the poor viewer is not subjected to sequel after sequel of Sanak too, which ought to have been edited to make it objective and hold the attention of the audiences, as Sanak is all action and gory minus a plausible plot