Critics reviews

Almost the entire first half feels like a chaotic-yet-flat set-up where these characters slide in and out. A post-interval portion gives us a glimpse of what the film was aiming for – dark, twisty, fast-paced, with each character trying to outwit the other– but overall it remains choppy, and half-baked.

Told like a pulpy crime fiction by a new fanboy of Tarantino, Aasmaan’s mise-en-scène grips and some of the early set pieces promise to take us on a roller-coaster ride through a morally agnostic landscape, but somehow, the whole turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

I don’t remember the last time I kept hoping for a Bollywood film to get better, and it only got worse... Because even when Kuttey finds the meat of its story – several groups trying to intercept and loot a van carrying an enormous amount of cash – it continues to marinate in randomness.

It’s a familiar botched heist film, confidently executed but in search of individuality and distinctiveness. Despite the eminently Indian context, the spirits of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, together with Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj (the director’s filmmaker father), are writ large on the high-octane, cocky, non-linear narrative with interwoven sub-plots.

Aasmaan, who has co-written the story with his filmmaker father Vishal Bhardwaj, has nicely handled this complex script. Even though the first half gets a tad slow and takes unnecessary time to build up, the fast-paced second half puts together all the pieces of puzzle together, albeit it's too chaotic to take it all in at one go.

It's a decent concept note for a film-school project, but a feature-length drama needs a lot more than humans breaking into animal-stories at the drop of a hat. Kuttey, in that sense, feels like a violent mishmash of borrowed vision and perspectives. It comes across as the sort of movie that's made to impress rather than express.