Police Brutality Can Be Fun – Deva Review

Police brutality is a pervasive evil with a long history. But in Deva (new to Netflix as of March 28th), this evil is deployed to set up several genuinely funny moments and one very fun dance number. The film never tries too hard to give its anti-hero protagonist any redeeming qualities. Despite the boozing, cuckolding, and beating up of a grieving family right outside the funeral of their loved one, lead actor Shahid Kapoor manages to make the character of insanely corrupt cop Dev somewhat likeable. Kind of like a Tom Cruise swagger with more grimacing instead of smiling all the time, a more chipper Dirty Harry.

In his Hindi language debut, director Rosshan Andrrews remakes his own Malayalam film about an amnesiac cop from 2013, although with a major change to a central plotpoint. This change removes some of the natural understanding we’d have for our main character’s desperate acts. It’s almost refreshing to not offer anything to explain away his terrible actions, we just have to accept that this guy sucks. And the film as a whole doesn’t seem concerned with making a moral point anyway. It shows us these cops exist, we know they’re as bad or worse then the criminals they’re supposed to bring to justice, but now let’s have some fun. Some of the plot twists might not be the most shocking, but the way the story dodges redemption keeps you on your toes.

The on location action scenes in Mumbai look great and feel alive although one pivotal scene looks like it has some flimsy CGI greenscreen business going on. This unignorably fake scene disrupts you at the beginning right after a well crafted opening credits montage of a degrading city and its surveillance infrastructure. This odd looking scene is so out of place that I thought maybe it was added to the movie ten minutes before they uploaded it to Netflix. Which can’t be possible because it had a prior theatrical release. Speaking of Netflix, the most dramatic part of the movie cut immediately to a commercial for windshield repair, but that’s my fault for not getting the premium version of the streaming service.

The one big musical number features Kapoor’s elastic dance moves choreographed by Bosco-Ceasar. He gets into his dance by waving his gun around wildly in a crowd, not following any safety protocol. The criminals he regularly terrorizes look on. They get to dance too in a sweet moment where they think he’s dead. Kapoor brings so much power-mad, coked-up energy to his performance here, giving us everything we need to know about his character in such an efficient and entertaining way.

In his unceasing brutality, Dev does something so heinous that I was unsure the movie could recover from it. For me it created some unexpectedly dark comedy later on though. With no memory of the incident due to his near complete amnesia, Dev has to fake his way through the disciplinary hearing. He stands face to face with his victim who he  cannot remember. Together they watch a video of his crime. It pauses on an image of Dev turned to the camera with his gun in the person’s mouth. Faced with his own actions, you’d expect him to become a better person. Instead it just reminds him soon after that he can deal with his problems by beating people up, much to the chagrin of his cell phone repair guy.

The funniest part to me comes out of nowhere. In a very brief moment that could almost have been in Naked Gun, members of the police force haul in Dev’s accountant and dentist to prove that he has amnesia and should be off the case. The accountant and dentist stand their wordlessly as Dev fails to recognize them.

How long will Dev be remembered for? A mural of Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar appears in the background a couple of times and in the movie poster. The film tries to raise Dev to similar anti-hero status with his own mural after a climactic scene where he shows he has not changed. I’m not sure if he will leave such a lasting impression, but you can’t say he wasn’t a good time.