Detective Sherdil

t’s a classic whodunit, says our desi Pink Panther, Detective Sherdil (Diljit Dosanjh). Of course, somewhere in the middle, he turns the phrase to “howdunnit”. Peppered with many red herrings, some dead giveaways too are thrown in. Set almost in comic book fashion, coming from the stable of Ali Abbas Zafar’s production house, ‘Detective Sherdil’ cuts no corners as far as the production design is concerned. Cinematographer Marcin Laskawiec trains his camera not only on the beauteous locales in Budapest, Hungary, but also matches the effervescent atmospherics of the film. Otherwise, the Hindi-English feature has all the regular trappings that come with an Indian murder mystery.

A billionaire is found dead. It is murder most foul. His will reveals a shocker. His fortune is split between his favourite canine and a complete outsider. Cue, shock and outrage. Enter sharp sleuth Sherdil, and the worms come wriggling out. On the suspects’ list is Pankaj Bhatti’s (Boman Irani) entire family, starting with wife Rajeshwari (Ratna Pathak Shah), son Angad (Sumeet Saigal) and daughter Shanti (Banita Sandhu). The dead man’s driver is also under the scanner, but the family’s ire is directed against Shanti’s boyfriend Poorvak (Arjun Tanwar), a deaf-mute like her, who is the biggest recipient of Bhatti’s generosity.

Detective Sherdil begins with a rap number talking up its quick-witted protagonist, ending with a declarative “Sherlock and Bakshi could never compare!” A tall claim, but also true in a sense. Neither Holmes nor Byomkesh hung around at crime scenes making reels. This, however, is what Sherdil (Diljit Dosanjh) does in the film’s opening scene, calling it a highlight of his job. The camera circles him in an arc. We are being introduced to a genius investigator. Instead, Diljit looks like he’s ready to drop his latest single. Having busted the biggest kidnapping ring in Budapest — oddly, no one, not even the White characters, speak a line of Hungarian — Sherdil is starting on a vacay. Promptly and unceremoniously, he’s dragged back to investigate the murder of telecom magnate Pankaj Bhatti (Boman Irani). On a highway, Bhatti’s car was waylaid and blown up by a bike-borne assassin. While the killer was caught, who were his paymasters?

Detective Sherdil is a remarkably annoying film. It’s the kind of over-the-top detective drama that tries to be playful, weird and campy to conceal its alarming lack of substance. It’s a whodunnit that leaves the viewer wondering who the film-makers are, not who the killer is. Even as a Knives Out-coded murder mystery (a line in Sherdil’s intro rap goes “Sherlock and Bakshi could never compare!”), it makes a mockery of the format. The supersleuth spends the last 30 minutes explaining the entire plot to us under the guise of revealing his findings to the killer(s). Except it never sounds like he’s decoded the case; he just magically knows everything. There is barely any sense of how he figures it out — he just did, down to the finest detail of what every character was thinking. The film buries this lazy writing beneath a deafening background score and some of the most disorienting comic-book-style editing in recent memory. The transitions are so unserious that it’s hard to tell which shot a character is in.

कुछ फिल्में देखने के बाद ही नहीं बल्कि देखते समय ही मन के एक कोने में ये सवाल उठने लगते हैं कि आखिर इन्हें बनाने की प्रक्रिया क्या रही होगी? कैसे इस कहानी पर किसी निर्माता को राज़ी किया गया होगा? इसके लिए पैसे कहां से जुटाए गए होंगे? बड़े कलाकारों को कैसे राज़ी किया गया होगा? इसकी शूटिंग के लिए जगह कैसे तय की गई होगी? किस तरह से एक नामी ओ.टी.टी. प्लेटफॉर्म को यह फिल्म दी गई होगी? वगैरह-वगैरह…! और फिर मन के दूसरे कोने से आवाज़ आती है-अरे भोले, लगता है तू भूल गया कि बाप बड़ा न भैया, सबसे बड़ा…!!! बुल्गारिया (यह यूरोप का एक देश है) में रह रहे एक अमीर भारतीय बिज़नैसमैन का कत्ल हो जाता है। शक सीधे उसके परिवार वालों पर जाता है। ज़ाहिर है कि वह अपनी दौलत के चलते मारा गया। बुल्गारिया की पुलिस के तीन भारतीय अफसर इस केस को सुलझाने में लगे हैं। किस ने किया होगा यह कत्ल? क्यों किया होगा? क्या घर का ही कोई आदमी है या फिर…?

There’s a germ of a promise when the credits open with how his parents, Sherni and Dilbag named him Sherdil and a peppy rap follows. But genius in the guise of eccentric sleuths is such a familiar central character that when Sherdil (Diljit Dosanjh) punctuates other people’s dialogues with music from his harmonica, his studied cool grates. The setting too is familiar though it is pleasing to the eye. Murder in a billionaire’s mansion in Budapest. Sherdil is like James Bond, vacationing between cases. “Bade bade cases solve karta hoon aur chhote chhote vacations gift karta hoon.” But when Indian-origin billionaire Pankaj Bhatti (Boman Irani) is assassinated in his car, Sherdil is piqued.

Falling back on the done-to-death down Agatha Christie template of a rich man’s mansion, one murdered dude and multiple suspects opening the way for a maverick detective to solve the mystery, Detective Sherdil’s bag of twists and tricks have little intrigue and zero cunning. But the silliness it packs in the guise of humour not only trivialises a likeable star but squanders its ensemble cast into one-note distractions. Its stale and dull suspense, set in Budapest for visual novelty, kickstarts when a moneybags (Boman Irani) is brutally bumped off, setting the stage for Sherdil – a blend of Sherlock-meets-Karamchand-meets Byomkesh, strictly by his own standards – to crack the case concerning muddled inheritance and greedy claimants.