From the high of Gangs of Wasseypur to a string of misfires in recent years, Anurag Kashyap’s filmmaking remains technically brilliant yet narratively inconsistent, leaving audiences dazzled but often frustrated. W
Anurag Kashyap’s neo-noir thriller Kennedy, starring Rahul Bhat and Sunny Leone, was finally released on streaming platform Zee5 on February 20, nearly three years after its initial release at Cannes in 2023. And, like with much of Kashyap’s work over the last six-seven years, watching the film was a frequently frustrating experience. Kennedy has plenty of elements that are skilfully rendered, especially if you view them in isolation, as standalones.
Rahul Bhat delivers an impressively dead-eyed performance as Uday Shetty/Kennedy, the titular ex-policeman who now works as a hitman for a cabal led by Mumbai’s corrupt Commisioner of Police, Rasheed Khan (Mohit Takalkar). The character of Charlie, Sunny Leone’s spin on the femme fatale archetype, is also enjoyable, and her style blends with Kashyap’s absurdist humour quite well. The film’s old-fashioned orchestral score — performed superbly by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra — imbues proceedings with an air of Hitchcockian foreboding.
And yet Kennedy remains (frustratingly) much less than the sum of its parts. Uday Shetty’s past, and how he became the taciturn psychopath we see at the beginning of the film, is left far too late in the picture (at around the 120-minute mark in a 140-minute film), by which time half the audience would have mentally tuned out of the goings-on. There are other problems with the screenplay as well — Shetty is introduced to us as a killer who’s methodical, precise and almost serene (he listens to Tchaikovsky and Paganini, a detail that works very well in the film’s opening scene).
And yet, by the time the film enters its third act, we have witnessed him massacring an entire family in a sloppy, careless manner. He even dabbles in vigilantism — killing a bunch of roadside bullies — for no apparent reason. These contradictions make it hard to be truly invested in Uday as a character, and even harder to decipher why he looks and sounds the way he does, why he kills without emotion and why he is drawn to certain people.
Kashyap’s underwhelming recent form
Generally speaking, Kashyap has suffered an indifferent run of form in the 2020s. Choked (2020), Dobaaraa (2022), Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat (2023), Nishaanchi and Nishaanchi 2 (both released in September 2025) — all of these films eventually turned out to be middling. They’re not terrible cinema, but they are far from Kashyap’s best and certainly a far cry from his heyday between 2012-2017, where he produced a string of incredible, genre-bending films, each tonally different from the preceding one — Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Ugly (2014), Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016) and Mukkabaaz (2017). So what went wrong for Kashyap, a man who even his detractors say is one of the most naturally talented creators in Bollywood? What missteps do these films have in common?
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For me personally, a big common thread that I can identify here is a weak second half, especially in terms of the screenplay. Dobaaraa’s second half was derailed by overusing its own science fiction devices. Choked became lost in its own self-indulgent demonetisation allegory in the second half, after a superb first half that works as a straightforward cautionary tale about greed. In both Nishaanchi and its sequel, the second half suffers because of too many narrative segues and digressions — again and again, we are shown an underwhelming flashback with UP-and-Bihar-flavoured Hindi zingers that sound cool but add little to our understanding of the character or the situation.
Another major problem that these films share is style over substance. Dobaaraa had an elaborate, stylised tribute to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. in its first ten minutes, but that energy quickly abandoned the film as it began laying down the rules of its sci-fi world in a laborious, unconvincing manner. Nishaanchi essentially tries to repackage the Gangs of Wasseypur desi swagger for a new generation, but falls well short of the mark when it comes to the emotional stakes.
Huma Quraishi and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in a still from Gangs of Wasseypur II
In Gangs of Wasseypur, we were fully locked in with Faizal Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) in part two because of everything we had seen him and his family go through in the preceding hours. For Nishaanchi, however, beyond the initial shock value of watching identical twins (played diligently by debutant Aaishvary Thackeray), we are not particularly invested in either Babloo or Dabloo’s ride, or their competing affections for Rinku (Vedika Pinto). This is because in the first Nishaanchi film we hardly ever see Dabloo or Babloo by themselves — by placing both twins only in support of or opposition to each other, the film sabotages both characters. Neither of them are allowed to be their own man until the beginning of the second film, set several years after the first.
Meta-commentary overwhelming the ‘main’ text
A third significant issue with Kashyap’s recent work — his political commentary seems to have overpowered his storytelling instincts. During his best phase, Kashyap knew how to use political commentary in short, sharp, strategic bursts. If you look at the opening scene of Mukkabaaz, it shows a bunch of ‘cow vigilantes’ committing an act of shocking violence and capturing the same on camera. The scene not only sets the stage for the film’s lower-caste underdog protagonist, it also works as a critique of Hindutva vigilante groups such as the Bajrang Dal. Crucially, Kashyap does not repeat this trick across the film and is content with this drive-by shooting at Hindutva’s expense — he knew one more segue along similar lines would derail the film’s main storyline, which was already overstuffed with ideas in every scene.
Rahul Bhat in a still from Kennedy
This sense, of when a narrative device overstays its welcome and becomes a gimmick, appears to have deserted Kashyap entirely. In Kennedy, while Uday Shetty is in the middle of killing one of his targets, we are shown the target’s son stumbling onto the unfolding murder of his father (a local politician whose interests clash with those of Shetty’s boss). But in a lurid twist, the son does nothing to stop the murder, choosing instead to murder his mother in the other room — with each blow he berates the old woman for not selling their old house. This mindless, meaningless segue (the murderous son is killed right afterwards by Uday anyway) did nothing for me and in my view, it did nothing for the film either. The mother’s murder actually dilutes the impact of the father’s murder.
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In the last few years, Kashyap has expressed his dissatisfaction with Bollywood in several interviews, opining that the industry is only interested in quick and easy cash-grabs, as opposed to honest storytelling and raw, powerful ideas. He has moved out of Mumbai and he has accepted many acting roles in Tamil and Malayalam-language movies of late, usually playing colourful villains. And while he’s not a bad actor, most observers would agree that doing these films (other than Rifle Club, arguably) is a massive waste of time for such a talented director.
Kashyap’s next release, the prison drama Bandar: Monkey in a Cage (slated for May 22 release), has been co-directed with Sakshi Mehta and stars Bobby Deol. Bandar is about a middle-aged, over-the-hill actor called Samar (Bobby Deol) who has a one-night stand with an ex-girlfriend (Sapna Pabbi) who later accuses him of rape and soon, he’s locked up. I haven’t seen the film so far, but after it was screened at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last year, there were reviews that highlighted certain troubling aspects of the screenplay.
For example, the critic Sucharita Tyagi pointed out what she called the film’s “flip-flops” on MeToo and rape culture. Tyagi writes, “By minimising this man’s alleged crime, the film almost seems to be saying, “so what, there are larger things we must discuss here! Men too are victims of the same system!” Another review, on the Lyca Radio Network, notes that the film—purportedly about a patriarchal culture that rewards a man-child like Deol’s character — bizarrely ends with on-screen text citing statistics about false rape cases in India. This strikes me as Kashyap undercutting his own point — or trying to have it both ways, trying to appease both “men’s rights activists” and advocates of the MeToo movement.
Whatever the reasons may be, it cannot be denied that Kashyap has been in a creative funk for several years now. One hopes that he snaps out of it soon and returns to the heights scaled by a Gangs of Wasseypur or a Dev D.
