Bloody Daddy Is Bloody Good Fun

Bloody Daddy Is Bloody Good Fun — Until It's Not

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. Today: Shahid Kapoor's Bloody Daddy.

Dir: Ali Abbas Zafar

Cast: Shahid Kapoor

Stream on: JioCinema

AMONG the current crop of filmmakers in Hindi cinema, few can milk commercial tropes as effectively as Ali Abbas Zafar. Across his little-over-a-decade spanning career, Zafar has straddled stereotypes and sentimentality with such commitment that it is difficult to remain unmoved by it. For instance in Bharat (2019), a sprawling drama set against Partition which not just glossed over historical details but had a 44-year-old actress essay the role of a mother to a 53-year-old male superstar, the lingering pathos of sibling separation is so brazenly depicted that it affects you despite the actor on screen being Salman Khan. This is not meant as a jibe as much as admiration for Zafar’s chops as a storyteller. His recent outing then, whose central narrative is as overwrought as how far a father will go to protect his son, is only uplifted with his presence.

Bloody Daddy is an adaptation of the 2011 French film Sleepless Night. The universality of the premise has ensured other retellings before — Sleepless (2017; starring Jamie Foxx) in English and Thoongaa Vanam (2015; Kamal Haasan) in Tamil. On his part, Zafar takes the source material and renders a stylistic, chaotic and largely hilarious iteration that works well for the most part. But just when it is supposed to uncoil, it scatters.

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