Making a con film for the masses in India comes with its own challenges, considering that this is a genre that’s all about the smarts. You just cannot dumb it down nor can you add too much sophistication and alienate a huge chunk of the audience.
Kunal Deshmukh’s Raja Natwarlal , written by Parveez Shaikh, Narender Kumar and Sanjay Masoom, gets most things right. The stakes are high, the trick is smart and the formidable villain is clever too.
The target Varda Yadav (a reliably menacing Kay Kay Menon) is always picking holes in the yarn spun by the con man (Raja), and the writers find ways to plug the leaks. The more the leaks, the more the fixes. So when the How-dunnit is finally explained, a simple trick is made to look more convoluted than it is because there are just too many things to explain.
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It doesn’t help that the girl (Humaima Malick is stunning but wasted in a stereotypical underwritten character) is always doing the silliest things to ruin the plan. Why do actresses agree to play such stupid characters? In one of the more ridiculous moments, after the cops blackmail her to blurt out the plan if she wants them to save his life, the girl gets him to spill the beans when they are in bed. The camera watches what we can only imagine was the ending of a sex tape. It’s one thing if the cops put a camera there and the girl didn’t know. But we know the girl knew about the camera. And we later know the guy too knew. So, for the sake of the con, they just decided to have a CCTV camera watch them in bed all that time?
Raja Natwarlal thankfully has the right pace working for it. The villain is close on their heels, fact-checking the story they are trying hard to sell him. Varda Yadav is the film’s script-doctor who makes sure that there’s some reason he believes them despite his discerning nature. Thanks to Kay Kay Menon, we buy into it too because he’s not the average villain waiting to jump at the bait. He’s known to be meticulous and well informed. Even when he gives into impulse, we know why he does the things he does.
Emraan Hashmi has come a long way from his early days of kissing his way to fame. He’s now figured out a way to be convincing as an actor even in the kind of roles he can sleepwalk through. Paresh Rawal (as the master con man brought out of retirement) lends able support but is short-changed a bit as the student turns out to be smarter than the teacher in almost no time, making the need for his existence almost redundant.
Yuvan Shankar Raja’s music tries to bridge the North-South divide and the songs exist just to unleash the Hashmi-Malick chemistry, a more adult version of the Akshay Kumar-Kajal Agarwal track in Special 26 .
Some day, we hope Hindi cinema realises that a good con film would work better when you don’t give the audience any time to think. Because every song break is an opportunity to second-guess the twist.
Learn from The Prestige , guys. We are watching closely.
Raja Natwarlal
Storyline: A conman needs to avenge the death of his partner in crime by pulling the biggest con ever
Bottomline: Convenient and convoluted, but among the better con films made in India