Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Sanya Malhotra, Dalip Tahil, Shilpa Shukla
Director: Sailesh Kolanu
Rating: Two stars (out of 5)
With the exception of a fresh set of actors, a new location and a minor and contrived climactic tweak, HIT: The First Case, a Hindi remake of the 2020 Telugu thriller of the same name, is a dreary, completely pointless replication of a whodunit that quickly turns into a whydunit.
Writer-director Sailesh Kolanu's film opts for the same character names and even identical camera angles in many a crucial scene for this tired retelling. It is difficult to fathom why he had to take another shot at the first case after it was duly done and dusted with some degree of success
Those who have seen the original film headlined by Vishwak Sen - it was released barely two-and-a-half years ago, weeks before the nationwide lockdown brought the theatrical exhibition business to a grinding halt - watching this inexplicable reiteration with Rajkummar Rao in the lead would be a total waste of time.
HIT: The First Case is about a PTSD-afflicted, pyro-phobic investigator, Vikram (Rajkummar Rao), whose career with the Homicide Intervention Team (HIT) is in danger of derailing because of a trauma of the past that haunts him and gets in the way of his work in the field
His analytical acumen is as acute as ever, but the sight of violent death and mutilated corpses unsettles the man. His shrink advises Vikram to leave the police force and look for a less stressful job. He initially pooh-poohs the suggestion.
Even as a struggles with his fragile mental state - he eventually opts for three months' leave on the psychiatrist's suggestion - he is sucked into two missing person cases two months apart. Both the victims are women. One of them is college student Preeti, the other forensic scientist and Vikram's girlfriend Neha (Sanya Malhotra).
The story is relocated from Hyderabad and Telangana to Jaipur and Rajasthan, which, of course, makes the visual topography markedly different. Yet, HIT: The First Case ill-advisedly manipulates the palette to make everything look crushingly stale and ennui-inducing. A highway, a toll gate, a police station on the outskirts of the city and the HIT headquarters bear the same look that they did in the Telugu film.
All through HIT: The First Case, one cannot, therefore, help wondering why the director would want to make the same film twice in a time span of two years when he has no apparent intention of breaking fresh ground. The lines that the characters spout are translated into Hindi (and a smattering of the local dialect) with slavish exactitude and the situations begin and end just the way that they did the first time around
Even if you don't know what the Telugu-language police procedural was about, you would still find it hard to warm up to anything that the Hindi version has on offer. Two women have disappeared and almost everybody (including the troubled Vikram) who has had anything to do with either of the unrelated duo is a suspect.
The film moves forward and backward, using a method of elimination to close in on the culprit although there is no way of knowing whether the two crimes have been committed by the same person or two different individuals.
The audience is supposed to believe that Our Man Vikram is a peerless sleuth and nothing ever escapes his attention. But when push comes to shove, he seems to grope in the dark and fall for false leads way too frequently for his reputation to be taken at face value.
The homicide investigation outfit that Vikram is a part of has a member he does not see eye to eye with - a fact that queers the already muddy pitch for a man who anyway has his own festering demons to deal with. While the difficult colleague spells trouble in may ways, but Vikram stands his ground despite the personal challenges.
Suspended police sub-inspector Ibrahim (Milind Gunaji), the first man on the spot from where the first girl went missing, and the HIT chief Ajit Singh Shekhawat (Dalip Tahil), who usually has Vikram's back, surface at different points of the investigation as Vikram labours to get to the bottom of the truth with the assistance of a junior who happily carries most of the workload to ease matters for his anxiety-ridden boss.
A woman named Swapna (Shilpa Shukla), who makes a big deal about the fact that she is a divorcee and frets over the way society treats a woman who lives alone, pops up on Vikram's radar. She sparks a particularly knotted phase of the investigation in which polygraph and narco tests create more problems than they solve for the investigating officer.
HIT: The First Case never becomes the taut, intriguing, suspenseful police drama that it desperately wants to be. The routine rigmarole apart, the final reveal is terribly daft, a forced twist that is the only departure that this film makes from the original. It is only a small detail that is modified to turn a mundane case of envy (in the original film) into a woke affair and heartbreak, but the individuals - and the casualties - at the centre of the big closing reveal hold no surprises.
On the acting front, Rajkummar Rao strives hard to tide over the contradictions that plague the protagonist. Sanya Malhotra is saddled with a walk-on part that has little potential. The others in the cast play types rather than rounded characters.
HIT: The First Case would have been much better off being a dubbed version of the Telugu film in this era of pan-Indian releases. The standalone sequel to the original, HIT: The Second Case, is due for release on the last Friday of this month.
This one ends with the announcement of a sequel. A Hindi-language HIT: The Second Case is on the way. On the evidence available thus far, that is more a warning than a promise.