Kartavya Review: Saif Ali Khan Shines But This Film, A Disservice To Rasika Dugal, Is Lost In Its Own Chakravyuh

Kartavya Movie Review: Another brooding cop thriller on streaming? Groundbreaking! The vessel of tortured cops hasn’t run dry. This is a bottomless well. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. And giving. And giving. The latest to join this bandwagon is director Pulkit’s Kartavya. Seven years after Sacred Games, Saif Ali Khan returns to don the uniform again.

But this Netflix film is nothing like its 2018 marquee show. We know, it’s unfair to draw any comparisons. Two shows can never be the same. But Kartavya lacks the edge, the punch, the spunk, the depth, the nuance of the series that turned over a new leaf for Saif. Here, there are two subplots, running parallel to one another. But none of them is intriguing and novel enough to keep you hooked.

By the end of it, Kartavya merely becomes yet another forgettable addition to the cornucopia of cop thrillers that only starts off promising. Don’t get us wrong, this is a film that has almost everything in its right place. On paper, this may have made for a rooted, dark telling of a murder in a small town, a boy gone missing, a corrupt godman, with caste conflict and suvarna privilege as subtext.

The execution, however, isn’t impressive enough. The makers try to tell so much in a span of 1 hour 48 minutes, but none of that comes through strong and coherent. To top it, despite the darkness and crimes, this is a world that looks too sanitised. Set in the fictional town of Jhamli, a journalist named Reema Dutta gets shot by unidentified assailants under the watch of SHO Pawan.

She had come to Jhamli to report on the mysterious disappearances of minor boys from Anand Shri’s ashram-esque space called Anand Bhoomi. Disappointed, Pawan’s senior Keshav gives him the yellow card. Pawan, however, requests him for a week to work on the case, find out the identities of the gunmen and prepare a charge-sheet.

Back home, his brother Deepak elopes with his girlfriend Preeti. Alongside the murder case of the journalist, Pawan has to find his brother too. And much like at the cop station, there are simmering egos and tensions at home too. He shares a rather complicated and tense relationship with his father and that renders a layer of nuance to the story until it doesn’t.

This father-son complex gets some attention but not explored with the depth it demands, leaving the narrative emotionally shortchanged. The story wants to be deep but won’t do the digging. Is it a format issue? Should Kartavya have been a series as opposed to a film? Probably. What we eventually get isn’t a thriller but a crime drama.

No, there’s no issue with that. But for a film steeped in crime, betrayal and bureaucratic politics, one would assume some incredible climactic sequences and some interesting plot twists. Kartavya, unfortunately, is devoid of both. The monotony of its linearity and underwhelming predictability become its weakest link. And then come the Mahabharata references.

Pawan and his subordinate Ashok speak of Abhimanyu. On the surface, Pawan seems to be a reflection of the connotations that Abhimanyu carries. He’s brilliant and courageous but with a doomed potential. In another scene, there’s also parallelism drawn to Arjun, particularly in light of what unfolded on the 14th day of the Kurukshetra war, where he locked horns with his guru, Dronacharya.

Much like Arjun, Pawan too is caught between dharma, karma and kartavya (righteousness, deed and duty). Arjun chose kartavya. And so does Pawan even though that requires him to go against his own. Despite reaching for these parallels and invoking analogies that must have sounded brilliant on paper, the film doesn’t quite succeed in cashing the check.

So, while this allusion is thematically apt, it’s underdeveloped. Ultimately, the narrative collapses under its own weight. But credit lies where it’s due. The bumpy screenplay is partially elevated by a couple of strong performances by the cast. Saif as Pawan is no Sartaj Singh. But he manages to shine through and through even with the half-baked material at hand. He gets the Haryanvi dialect spot-on.

And thankfully, his Pawan isn’t written as a one-tone larger-than-life hero, who takes on the bad guys with gravity-defying stunts. Yes, he does have the saviour complex but that’s born out of being humane. He loves his wife and he wants to put an end to the age-old and dogmatic caste-based norms that may one day also destroy his son. Saif brings his signature charm to the table and makes Pawan quite likeable.

While Sanjay Mishra as Ashok is interesting with an eventually predictable character graph, he truly is as impressive as ever. The same can be said for Zakir Hussain. Manish Chaudhari as Keshav, on the other hand, doesn’t get to do much to leave an impact. But it’s child actor Yudhvir Ahlawat, a minor caught up in Anand Shri’s exploitation ring, fuelling the film’s central mystery, who stands out.

Saurabh Dwivedi as Anand Shri is presented as a menacing and complex godman but he ultimately gets reduced to a caricature – all posturing and smirking, no presence, no threat. But the real disappointment is Rasika Dugal, who plays Pawan’s wife. She barely even gets a name! For an actor of her stature, who has proved her mettle time and again, she’s criminally under-utilised.

She remains just the protagonist’s wife throughout the narrative. The writing does her a colossal disservice and her arc fails to contribute anything to the story. Nonetheless, she has a remarkably luminous screen presence. But it’s sad to see her calling the shots in an exceptional cop drama like Delhi Crime and then being relegated to the periphery in Kartavya.

In the end, Kartavya feels like a film caught between ambition and restraint. It wants to examine caste, masculinity, morality, institutional decay and generational trauma, but merely brushes past these ideas instead of sitting with them. There is atmosphere, there is intent and there are actors trying their best to salvage the material, but the storytelling never quite rises to meet its own gravitas.

What remains is a competently mounted yet emotionally distant crime drama that mistakes gloom for depth and mythological parallels for complexity. In a streaming landscape already overflowing with haunted cops and broken systems, Kartavya struggles to justify why its story needed to be told at all.