- Release Date: 31/05/2024
- Cast: Divya Khosla Kumar, Harshvardhan Rane, Anil Kapoor
- Director: Abhinay Deo
Divya Khosla Kumar’s lackluster performance undermines a well-crafted, thrill-laden narrative, stripping away its potential intrigue and excitement
— Ambar Chatterjee
“Savi” is the official remake of the 2008 French film “Pour Elle,” which was remade in English as “The Next Three Days” by Paul Haggis, who also happens to be an executive producer on “Savi.” The story revolves around a housewife, Savi (Divya Khosla Kumar), living with her husband (Harshvardhan Rane) and son in London. They have a perfect life until one day, Savi’s husband is arrested by the police on charges of murder. He is quickly tried and incarcerated for a crime that he repeatedly insists he has not committed. With overwhelming evidence against him, Savi’s every effort to get her husband released fails.
While in jail, Savi’s husband angers some powerful drug dealers, who end up brutalizing him. The men are restrained for a while but vow to take revenge on him. Savi realizes that she will lose her husband unless she does something to bring him out of prison. She decides to break her husband out of prison and, for this purpose, engages the help of an ex-con, Joydeep Paul (Anil Kapoor), who has broken out of prison numerous times and is apparently the most resourceful person with a reason to help Savi. What happens next forms the crux of the narrative.
I watched “The Next Three Days” when I was in college and was absolutely in love with the film. It wasn’t just the thrill elements that captured my imagination and made me appreciate the film but also the human drama and the interpersonal dynamics between the characters that rendered the thrill elements as effective as they turned out to be. Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks played so wonderfully off each other that there wasn’t a single emotional beat in the characters that was not comprehensible. I was completely in sync with everything that Russell Crowe’s protagonist was doing and understood all too well why he was so hell-bent on breaking his wife out of prison. The chemistry between the two characters in almost every scene was so palpable that it rendered every frustration, angst, tragedy, and breakdown of the characters believable. The longing of a mother and a husband to be reunited with their son and wife, respectively, was what made the film the thrilling adventure that it turned out to be. This was possible only because of the spirited performances that the ensemble cast of the film put in.
This is where “Savi” falls flat on its face. Divya Khosla Kumar is expected to lead the story and the drama from the front, as there is no other character in the film that is as noticeable or given as much time as her character. She does better in her rendering of the character than she has done before with some of the other characters she has played, but her doing better than her previous performances is still not enough to pull through a film that so much depended on her performance and how she was able to extract drama from the predicament of the character. Her character is well written and given enough chance to impact the audience, but her performance is so weak and feels so manufactured that no matter what she does, she is unable to extract the kind of tension, tragedy, and longing that Russell Crowe was able to extract from the audiences in the Paul Haggis film. The result is a screenplay that is racy and fun but is hardly anything more than that. With the protagonist turning out to be flat, unremarkable, and unable to extract genuine emotions, the majority of the thrill and intrigue in the narrative is liquidated. Divya Khosla Kumar tops it up with some moments in her performance where she aspires to fall back to those terrifyingly poor performances that garnered her the disrepute of being one of the worst leading ladies working currently in Bollywood.
Many critics and audiences are applauding Anil Kapoor’s turn as Joydeep Paul and are citing his character as an enterprising distraction from everything wrong in the film in terms of the performances. Let me be very clear on this. While Anil Kapoor is almost always great in whatever he does, his character in this film is nothing but a distraction and detraction from the seriousness and focus that the character of Savi needed to be laced with. Joydeep Paul is based on the character of Liam Neeson from “The Next Three Days,” which was just a scene long in duration. Here, the character is made an integral part of the narrative, making an appearance every time Savi is in trouble and saving her from tricky situations when all hope is lost. This not only robs the character of Savi of the independence and self-reliance that the protagonists in the other films were characterised by but also underlines the fact that she, being a lady, is constantly in need of assistance from other more powerful and resourceful men. The same character, when rendered as men in the other iterations of the film, found their way around challenges and problems on their own with very little help. This was something that worked to the detriment of the protagonist of the film. Anil Kapoor was good in his rendition, but his constant makeovers and the maniacal laugh that he often put out were neither necessary nor warranted in an otherwise serious narrative.
A film like this needed a poignant background score and some haunting melodies that would underline the scenes depicting the relationship between the husband and wife and the period the wife was trudging through in the absence of the husband. The background score also needed to highlight the portions where the wife is shown making plans and carrying them out. This would have accentuated the already heightened moments of thrill and intrigue. Sadly, the background score and the songs of the film are as drab and unworthy of the plot as Divya Khosla Kumar’s performance. This was uncharacteristic for a Mukesh Bhatt production (Vishesh Films), which is famous for giving us some of the most haunting and heart-warming melodies ever to have come out of Bollywood.
The only thing that worked for me in the film was the script, which has been getting refined with each iteration. Sadly, there were some elements in the script, like how the couple get back their son, the first attempt that Savi imagines of breaking her husband out of prison, and a portion where she goes after some thugs to get the money, she needs to carry out the breakout, that didn’t work for me as much as I would have liked to. The final plan also felt riddled with a lot of holes, which was not the case with the previous iterations of the film. Harshvardhan Rane has turned in some good performances here and there, but this was not his most memorable outing. It must also be noted that he had zero chemistry with Divya Khosla Kumar, and it hurt the film really badly. The final reveal of the protagonist’s name as Savitri and the parallels it was trying to draw was one of the biggest laugh-out-loud moments for me in the film, as I knew from the very beginning where the makers were headed with the name. “Savi” is a moderately entertaining film that you can watch in theatres if you are desperate to see something on the big screen, or you can wait just a few weeks before it comes out on Netflix.
Ambar Chatterjee's Reviews 