Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5 
Director: Anurag Kashyap

For Raman Raghav 2.0, master director Anurag Kashyap has had to buckle down, tighten theshoestrings of his budget, and attempt a kickback to what made his films tick. The box office disaster of his last year's Bombay Velvet produced for more than Rs.100 crore, not only ruined his professional upswing but also scuttled his plans to move to France. Raman Raghav 2.0 was made with Rs 3.5 crore,as if Kashyap is daring the very margins of mathematics itself to challenge him with a loss this time. The production cost, or paucity thereof, shows up clearly onscreen but the overall result, sadly, does not.

The script is inspired by a real-life serial killer Raman Raghav who bludgeoned 41 people to death in the Mumbai of the 1960s.

In this adapted present-day story set amidst Mumbai's shanty towns, a wise-cracking, articulate man (essayed by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who looks to be in his late 30s to early 40s, starts wreaking his psychopathic streak of violently bloody homicides. The police don't take him seriously and he uses this negligence to further his rampage. Rather unaccountably, he soon takes a fancy to, and begins to spy on Raghavan—a young cocaine-snorting police inspector (played by Vicky Kaushal) who appears nominally competent but looks more likely to get himself killed rather than apprehend criminals.

It is useful to see how this picture falls short by comparing it to the same director's film Ugly—a film ofpartially similar zeitgeist that also features pervasive criminality and a plethora of flawed human beings. Ugly throbbed with scene after scene of hypnotic intensity, further enhanced by a variety of powerful performances. RR2.0 shows promise in the first half but then suffers due to a shortage of memorablyconstructed scenes. The criminal here is interesting but not spellbinding, while the policeman is a one-dimensional example of the walking dead. Jay Oza's visuals are suitably grungy but do not match up to the starkly impressive canvases composed by Andritsakis. Ram Sampath's atypical background score is judiciously jazzy but not in the same league as McOmber's eerily minimalist score for the former film.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is undoubtedly competent as the deranged killer Ramanna but for all his witty remarks and calmly insane expositions, he comes across a garden-variety madman. Siddiqui's vaulting talent, this time, regrettably doesn't make him embody a truly spine-chilling killer.

Vicky Kaushal, as the coked-out cop, admirably executes Kashyap's instructions to lose weight and drink minimal water so as to look dehydrated. Unfortunately, it appears he got too dehydrated to act effectively and his wooden performance significantly short-changes the movie.

The film's assets are only a few. Ramanna's last meeting with his sister is the kind of weirdly orgiastic sequence that the director excels in. That protracted scene starts off with familial strife and then explodes into something else. The sister (Amruta Subhash) looks so much like a character from real-lifeunlike Mumbai filmdom's usually hackneyed casting.

Kashyap returns with all his favourite totems—fractured couples, father-son discord, substance abuse, etcetera. There are unnecessary nods to other films. Ramanna's iron pipe, which he drags along, recalls the cattle gun in No Country for Old Men, the emblazoned Chapter One, Two and so forth allude to Tarantino's style, and even the name 'Raghav' recalls the same name and somewhat similar themes in Aks. But sustained emotional intensity, overall flamboyance and constant momentum, which powered his best films, are in short supply here. His sure does put an interesting spin at the end but films are a lot more about the process than just the destination.

The good folks in Cannes, however, have chosen to continue the faith they showed in his previous superior films, and included RR2.0 in their 'Directors' Fortnight'. If his next film proves to be even more unfocused, then who knows, they might actually give him the Palme d'Or.