Anupama Chopra
Gumraah means astray. In the last 60 years, there have been four Hindi films with that title. As I watched this film, I wondered if Bollywood was so partial to this title because it speaks to a larger malaise. At least in this Gumraah, too much is astray.
Gumraah is a remake of a 2019 Tamil film called Thadam. I haven’t seen the original but the idea is intriguing – one murder, two suspects but both look identical so it becomes impossible to tell which one was at the site of the crime.
For viewers, Gumraah is a slog but for Aditya, it’s a showreel. He gets to play two distinct men and he is in almost every frame of the film. One version is the more traditional hero. Both versions get to take their shirt off. Aditya manages to make the two different but he can’t make either interesting.
Debutant director Vardhan Ketkar delivers a generic thriller, which isn’t half as smart as it thinks it is.
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