Crakk Review: Cracking Up For All the Wrong Reasons

Director: Aditya Datt
Writers: Aditya Datt, Rehan Khan, Sarim Momin, Mohinder Pratab Singh

Cast: Vidyut Jammwal, Arjun Rampal, Nora Fatehi, Amy Jackson, Jamie Lever

Duration: 155 minutes

Available in: Theatres

A Vidyut Jammwal actioner is my favourite kind of bad film. Over the years, I’ve grown strangely attached to this specific brand of badness. How do I explain it? It’s not sinister bad or dishonest bad; it’s mostly adolescent bad and don’t-know-any-better bad. Such films are the cinematic equivalent of a sweet, Hollywood-obsessed daredevil kid who keeps falling on Sports Day, so they get “well tried” pats instead of medals. Crakk is that kid too. Billed as India’s first extreme sports action movie, Crakk (its tagline is a threat: “Jeetega…Toh Jiyegaa!” Translation: “If you win… you live!” ) unfolds like a feature-length lovechild of a Mountain Dew and Thums Up commercial that gets adopted by Squid Game (2021) and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992). If this feels like a lot, wait till you hear the plot. That rhymed, but it also sounds like something the snarling villain of this film would say.

That’s not to say Jammwal isn’t a freakishly elastic action star. He’s very good at performing stunts – the physical sincerity is no laughing matter. The problem occurs between the action, when his characters must converse and feel and emote within a story. 

Mumbai to Maidaan

In Crakk, he stars as Sidhu, a slum-dwelling adrenaline junkie who speaks in distorted Mumbai slang – more Ram Jaane (1995) than Gully Boy (2019) – and does the choicest stunts. In fact, the film opens with a mighty impressive sequence featuring Sidhu doing parkour-level stuff in and on a speeding local train. As I said, you can’t blame the film for glorifying reckless who-dares-wins behaviour, because it doesn’t know any better. It means well; let it live a little. I’m starting to sound like a protective parent now. But I digress. So Sidhu’s dream has nothing to do with legal sports, as he tells his failed-athlete dad. He instead wants to qualify for this famous underground survival sports competition called Maidaan (“field”). He uploads his videos on the Maidaan website and, as luck would have it, gets summoned to Poland as one of 32 international players for the 2024 edition. In case you’re wondering, ‘crakk’ is slang for ‘crack (or crazy)’ which is what normies think Sidhu is (on), for the sort of gravity-defying swag he exhibits. 

As an extreme-sports actioner alone, Crakk might have stood a chance. Here’s a guy who wants to win a dangerous contest that killed his brother four years ago – three stages, an Rs. 80-crore payday, and a possible showdown with the boss-daddy of Maidaan, Dev (Arjun Rampal). Apparently, it’s the most watched event in the world. Wealthy people place bets on their favourites, while corny reaction shots emerge from all over the globe. (Contestants die regularly, and that’s fine; we’ll just assume the dark web is not so hidden anymore). So what if the only camera we see is a cellphone that belongs to Alia, a social media influencer (Nora Fatehi) who falls for Sidhu? The first stage of Maidaan, for some context, is like a budget version of a Mad Max: Fury Road set piece – the goal is to reach a flag on a speeding truck by jumping onto remote-controlled go-karts in what looks like a desert. The second stage features wild dogs, rollerblades, chained contestants and, again, red flags (metaphor much?). The finale is a bomb-strapped cycle race against Dev through caves and rush-hour Krakow. You know, the usual. Sidhu’s motive is clear: Closure for a brother he adored. 

Arjun Rampal Wants to Buy a Country

But Crakk isn’t satisfied with Sidhu going “oh teri!” or “teri maa ka Saki Naka!” every other scene. It wants more. Or less. The sport is, ironically, the expendable part of the film. Because Dev is no regular baddie. Maidaan is simply a front for him to sell plutonium and nuclear-bomb material to rich nations so that – let me get this straight – he can buy an unclaimed country “between Egypt and Africa” (last I checked, Egypt is a country in the continent of Africa) and rule the world. Unfortunately for Dev, his father is a senior founder and Maidaan purist; the man does not approve of Dev’s exploitation of his beloved bloodlust-sport.

Also involved, then, is a Polish-Indian intelligence agent (Amy Jackson) who tries to get Sidhu to be a mole in her quest to expose Dev’s evil empire. She is not very good at her job, of course, because Sidhu only bothers to pick a side once he discovers that Dev might have been responsible for his brother’s death. Oh, there’s also a queer Brazilian contestant who promises Sidhu that he will take care of his parents if he dies. What is even happening anymore? 

The point being: Crakk is needlessly convoluted, long and self-sabotaging. The dubbing of Jammwal, Jackson and Fatehi is so awry that it looks like they’re lip-syncing songs rather than dialogue. It doesn’t help that Sidhu has more chemistry with his brother’s ghost than he does with Alia. The pre-interval portions – a shootout with the police, a cancellation of Stage 2, Sidhu going from Dev’s contestant to Dev’s enemy – are incoherent. At some point, the crowds cheering for Sidhu barely react to his rival being blown to smithereens; they continue cheering, and we’re supposed to imagine that they aren’t in ancient Rome? Rampal gets a lot of screen-time, even when Dev is doing nothing except grinning, orating or enjoying the sound of his own voice. I like him as these hammy Om-Shanti-Om-style sinners (read Dhaakad, Ra.One), but there’s only so much of Crak-ness one can handle. 

Certain questions have no answers. The agents are seen rooting for Sidhu and celebrating his wins, even as live deaths are broadcast to the world on their watch. Collateral damage, I guess. I know it’s an action film, and it’s in Europe, but the story’s creative licence seems to be languishing in an expired passport. I’m not going to end by writing something predictable and mean like “Surviving Crakk is the real extreme sport”. Because it’s not. If anything, some of the film’s badness is enjoyable; its oblivion even cracked me up. You can’t blame a kid for trying too hard. But crawling home in peak-hour traffic after the screening on perennially dug-up Mumbai roads (or, well, ‘maidaans’) is an extreme sport. No Dev can design that race. No Sidhu can make it out of Andheri.