Review of movie Vandi

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Rating:2/5

Vandi opens with a shot of a bike. A voiceover, by actor Shiva, informs us that the film is the story of this bike, which even has a name – Duttu. But then, for over an hour, we get the story of three, hard-on-luck, young men, who are roommates – Krishna (Vidaarth), a waiter at a hotel, Rafiq, who works at a roadside eatery, and Arun, who’s employed at the railway parking space. Money is a constant problem and Krishna manages to make the situation worse by losing an iPhone that belongs to a gangster-type. And then, the bike that he uses temporarily, taken from Arun’s parking space, is found to be a stolen one and has even been used in a robbery, landing him in trouble with the police. How do the three men extricate themselves from this position? And what exactly is Duttu’s story?

Despite the promising premise, Vandi suffers from sloppy writing a roundabout narrative structure. The film wastes too much time on the story of Krishna and his roommates and their problems, which we do not care about. For, even they hardly bother about it, often acting impetuously; in fact, they are more interested in boozing! The uneven tone doesn’t help and for much of its running time, we keep wondering what the film wants to be. For, it lacks the thrills to be a thriller, the humour to make it make it a black comedy and the emotional depth to be an engaging drama.