Hisaab Barabar: The slip between the cup and the lip

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For the umpteenth time, I must quote peak-time Subhash Ghai here: “Ideas don’t make films. Scripts do.” Here was the idea of a common man (a railway ticket-collector here) named Radhe Mohan Sharma (R. Madhavan), who is great at accounting, who single-handedly fights what he thought was minor yet pernicious corruption (his bank robbing customers of minor sums like a few paise and rupees) but ends up finding a huge fraud going on.

In the proves, he encounters corrupt cops, a politician and a nexus that reaches far and wide. Bank chairman Micky Mehta (Neil Nitin Mukesh) is someone who does not even stop at violence and can be a joker of sorts too. The corrupt cops include a woman, Poonam (Kirti Kulhari, now surprising showing a yen for gray and black characters—she played one in Badass Ravikumar too a week back), whose marriage proposal Radhe had rejected 15 years ago, so he assumes the worst when she also is hostile. As of now, Radhe is a single parent to Mannu (a delightful child star named Shaunak Duggal) as his wife has divorced him.

The struggles continue as Radhe is victimized: he loses his job, is accused of defrauding a trivial account (Rs. 17!) for which the punishment legally would be the same had the amount been huge (that’s what he is told!) and his house is destroyed. He does not regret what he has done, and soon, in a very ‘filmi’ way, redemption happens.

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The filmmakers clearly show accounting errors here: the slip between the cup (of intention and creation) and the lip (consumption) is massive and the script is very gimmicky, similar to other such ill-advised “anti-corruption” movies we have watched, especially those gone wrong in the last 20 years or so.

R. Madhavan does well, and Shaunak Duggal is very cute and natural as his son. From the rest, I was only impressed by Faisal Rashid as the bank official and Rashami Desai as Radhe’s neighbor. The rest are just serviceable. Neil Nitin Mukesh works when he is purely a baddie, but he is clearly not suited for the “comic villain” caricature part.

The film is a bad choice by R. Madhavan after long.

Rating: ** (Just About)

ZEE5 presents SP Cinecorp’s & Jio Studios’ Hisaab Barabar  Produced by: Sharad Patel, Shreyanshi Patel & Jyoti Deshpande  Directed by: Ashwini Dhir  Written by: Ritesh Shastri, Ashwini Dhir, Purva Naresh & Dolphy Fernandes  Music: Aman Pant Starring: R. Madhavan, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Kirti Kulhari, Rashami Desai, Shaunak Duggal, Himanshu Malik, Manu Rishi, Faisal Rashid, Rajesh Jais, Imran Hasnee, Ishtiyak Khan & others

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