‘Detective Sherdil' review: Thick on charm and thin on plotting
Sherdil is 'cursed with genius'. He says so himself and with so much confidence that we must believe him, even when the evidence sometimes points to the contrary.
The star performer of the Budapest police department is all set for a hard-earned vacation – 'my next case is a suitcase' – when a new assignment beckons. Billionaire Pankaj Bhatti (Boman Irani) has been killed. His driver Jaipal (Mukesh Bhhatt) and accountant Purvak (Arjun Tanwar) are missing.
Sherdil (Diljit Dosanjh) playfully interrogates Pankaj's wife Rajeshwari (Ratna Pathak Shah), son Angad (Sumeet Vyas), daughter Shanti (Banita Sandhu), brother-in-law Bodhi (Chunky Panday) and maid Falak (Kashmira Irani Saxena). Sherdil is Sherlock, Byomkesh and Karamchand combined – again, his words.
Blessed with limitless geniality, X-ray vision and deductive skills that border on the supernatural, Sherdil finds that Pankaj's death is not as straightforward as it appears.
Ravi Chhabriya's Hindi film too believes that there's more to the plot than a bunch of giggles delivered by a personified Cheshire Cat. Detective Sherdil is based on a story by Chhabriya and Ali Abbas Zafar and a screenplay by Zafar and Sagar Bajaj.
The ZEE5 release is a thriller in search of a proper mystery. Everyone in the cast – especially Sumeet Vyas and Ratna Pathak Shah – seems ready for a Knives Out -style romp. Detective Sherdil is thick with amiability but thin on the kind of detective work that even knowingly silly crime films need.
Why Budapest has so many Indian staffers, or how a wealthy family can be placed under house arrest during an investigation, are irrelevant, just as Diana Penty and Mikhail, as Sherdil's colleagues, are redundant. Their only job is to ensure an audience for Sherdil's brilliance.
Once the expectation of basic rigour is set aside – which is early on – the 106-minute move settles into a comedy in which grown-ups act like cartoon figures and Sherdil hops from one epiphany to the next. Diljit Dosanjh dominates the show without making it seem apparent.
He's too smooth to allow Sherdil to come off as an insufferable maven, and too amiable to get in the way of the other actors. Dosanjh twinkles brightly enough to light up a hill station. But charm, even when on the offensive, can only get you this far and no further.
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