Laal Rang review: Randeep Hooda shines with this hot topic Laal Rang

Laal Rang review: Randeep Hooda shines in this dark Haryanvi tale with this hot topic  movie

 Laal Rang

Cast: Randeep Hooda, Akshay Oberoi

Director: Syed Ahmad Afzal

Rating: 3/5

Neither the title, nor the trailer suggests anything about Laal Rang’s dark setting. So, when the macabre thriller unfolds, it manages to keep the audience engrossed. Randeep Hooda’s character Shankar spreads its charm and completely absorbs us into his blood transfusion racket where he plays both the devil and savior.

Shankar’s friendship leads Rajesh (Akshay Oberoi) into a blood bank scam run by some ambitious Haryanvi youths. It turns out to be a goldmine for poor Rajesh who wants to own latest bikes and cool shades. Like most gangster-prodigy stories, they also fall out, but their past doesn’t let them stay in peace.

Hooda owns the screen with his spontaneity and rustic appearance. His poor household doesn’t suffice for his magnanimity, but his actions do. From a heart-broken lover to a cunning fraud, he excels in every shade. His command over the local dialect and understanding of the neo-noir genre only helps his case.

It doesn’t take him a second to transform into a menacing blood theft mafia man from an affable neighbour. He cares for the people working for him, and runs a cartel that includes his former enemies. However, he won’t let out his biggest secrets to even his closest aides. In short, he is a chameleon.

Laal Rang revolves around an extremely important subject: corruption in blood banks. It is set in Karnal, Haryana, where Shankar Malik (Hooda) runs a successful blood donation racket. To make his illegal activities easier by becoming a government insider, he enrols in a Medical Lab Technology course at a government hospital.

There he meets the young and impressionable Rajesh Dhiman (Akshay Oberoi) who is so awe-struck by his charisma, his swagger, his inventive ways of making money under the table and his Yamaha RX100 (which, the film tells us, makes men irresistible to women) that he soon becomes his protégé.

Also in the picture is their straight-laced classmate Poonam Sharma (Pia Bajpai) and a late entrant into the story, Superintendent of Police Gajraj Singh (Rajniesh Duggall), the local Haryanvi boy who made it big.

The film's supporting actors are a uniformly competent lot, though a special mention must be made of Rajendra Sethi - another excellent yet underrated actor - playing one of Shankar's cohorts. Bajpai is good for the most part even though she is not entirely convincing with her fake bad English.

In what is one of the film's nicest touches, the characters in Laal Rang are not built up as menacing repulsive villains, yet they are clearly an amoral bunch who, for instance, celebrate a dengue epidemic because of the gains it brings blood racketeers like them. What the film teaches us about their underhand dealings is terrifying. It is the kind of story that will make you hesitate to ever visit a blood bank again, though of course we do not have a choice in this matter, a realisation that would chill any normal human being to the bone.

The film's undoing is what seems to be confusion over the tone it wants to achieve. And so, although large parts of the narrative have a very apt, realistic feel to them, Laal Rang never becomes as gritty as it needed to be because of its tendency to intermittently wander off into long, loud songs supplemented by stylised, slow motion shots. The insistent background score is used to underline every single emotion, twist and turn as if for fear that the audience may miss the point.

As standalone scenes and music videos outside a feature film, some of these are pretty impressive. In one passage in the film, for instance, Shankar takes Rajesh for a ride on his mobike and as the music plays and the wind blows through his hair, he seems to ask his young pillion rider to take the handlebars while he himself lets go and reaches into his pocket for a cigarette. Ooh. Neat.

While this scene works because it comes before we discover the horrid reality of the blood underworld that is Laal Rang's focus, once we settle into that theme, the repeated musical asides become an irritant.

The music is not that memorable and the plot could have been a bit pacy with a not too predictable climax. However, all said and done, Laal Rang is not a bad watch and for fans of Randeep Hooda, the film will surely be a weekend treat.