An action that spans 24 hours must, above all, move at breakneck speed. Bloody Daddy, a remake of the French film Nuit Blanche that was remade in Tamil as ‘Thoonga Vanam’ starring Kamal Hasan, has all the hallmarks of a fast-paced thriller. Despite the rare spike, it sags back into the seen-it-all-before category, which has a lot to do with its over-two-hour runtime, flattening a plot that isn’t as surprising as it thinks it is.
A bag of cocaine worth Rs 50 crore is being pursued by a crew of cops and gangsters through Delhi and Gurugram. The video plainly states that it takes place after the epidemic’s second phase, when things began to open up. After months of forced abstinence, people want to party hard again, which, of course, increases drug demand. The suspense of not knowing which cop is a crook propels the film only so far, because all the signs are there from the start, when an early morning shoot-out kills two drug runners and sends the two people who collect the bag on the run.
So, which narcotics officers are on the bad guys’ payroll? Could it be Sumair (Shahid Kapoor), who sustains a bullet wound in the first five minutes of the film and nurses it throughout while playing buddy with his tiny son, who, of course, will be used as bait in no time? What about Samir (Rajeev Khandelwal), who keeps receiving weird phone calls? Or Aditi (Diana Penty), who alternates between the two, seeking to be severe and on-the-nose?
On the other side of the law, there is no such ambiguity. Ronit Roy is wearing an expensive red jacket and lording it over his own seven-star hotel’s den. And Sanjay Kapoor, with matching crimson scowls, accompanied by a right-hand man who passes both the sniff-and-tell and the loyalty test. Other thugs march around the hotel, where a big-ticket wedding is taking place and guests are waiting for artist Badshah to pick up the tempo.