STORY
Business tycoon Ashish Kapoor (AK) invites his family and close friends to his residence in a Scottish castle and throws a birthday party one day. Each of the invitees has a different kind of dispute with him. Meanwhile, AK also invites a CBI officer Mira Rao to arrest him for running away from his home country over non-payment of salaries to his 10,000 employees and owing 200 billion rupees to the Indian banks.
The party does not proceed as planned and AK infuriates everyone. But to everyone’s shock, AK dies in mysterious circumstances. Mira senses that one of the invitees murdered AK. So Meera investigates the crime, searches for the culprit, and judges their neeyat.
NEEYAT ON KNIVES
Like every critic and audience of the film, I will also raise a similar theory that ‘Neeyat‘ highly reminds me and looks to be inspired from ‘Knives Out‘ and ‘Glass Onion‘ as well as Agatha Christie‘s narrative style of detective novel. Knives Out was released worldwide in the last quarter of 2019, so it is highly likely that director Anu Menon would have taken the inspiration and presented her version of Knives Out but without giving the credit to be Knives Out’s official remake. But taking inspiration from Glass Onion is very unlikely because that was released by the end of 2022. Whereas Neeyat was released 7 months after Glass Onion.
A CAST WITHOUT BLAST
In any case, Neeyat comes with an interesting story with a talented cast but surprisingly, Anu Menon fails to thrill me because the entire murder mystery was badly written and directed. I felt if the makers had zero passion to rock my world for at least 90 minutes and drop my inquisitiveness towards drawing the line of suspense and head towards a shocking revelation.
What also astound me was the actors in the film being over-dramatic. No one bothered to drive us into contemplation by their performances. They were just rich on the camera but not by acting skill. Actors like Neeraj Kabi, Shahana Goswami, Rahul Bose, Amrita Puri, and Ram Kapoor left no impression at all.
Vidya Balan in the lead as Mira Rao was the only who did favor and after a really shocking revelation, her being so bad as a CBI officer made sense. Now when I rewind a few moments of her character’s body language against every development of that day, her strange attitude completely makes sense.
BAD EXECUTION
What goes wrong with the film is the poorest execution of the entire script that certainly held promises. First of all, Neeyat was unfit to be made as a film. It should have been a limited series. Second, the appearance of a huge casting for the film breaks the spine because neither many characters grew with time, nor they developed with others in the same room. And this is a vital reason why Neeyat must have been a limited series. Third, the developments built no tension at all. If someone got killed besides AK, it didn’t crash the audience. The screenplay was sagging. Fourth, as per my calculation, it took 53 minutes to officially kick off the main purpose of the story. Not that if 53 minutes were spent in building the tempo before the crime. It was just not pacing with so many characters indirectly demanding to have their respective screen minutes.
CLOSING REMARKS
Project Neeyat is a plan failed by its engineers and contractors. The hired labors not utilized properly. A magician forgetting his trick or Genie disappearing from the lamp. Neeyat is a failed concert with the spectators walking out and Vidya Balan on the drum watching her band leaving with drumsticks in her hands hanging in the air.
RATING 4/10
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Sami Naik | Film Critic 