Rahul Desai
Kuttey is, as the title suggests, mostly about the dog(s). All of them are blindly chasing a (cash-filled) car. I take umbrage with the choice of animal – canines are loyal and lovely and life-affirming – but that’s a debate for another day. I guess it’s the slang that sounds cool. I guess these are wild dogs. But I digress. So each one of them is hungry and desperate.
The intent is to locate a black comedy within the chaos of multiple people targeting the same truck on the same night. If the plan is to make violence look funny in a Tarantino way, it fails. The director himself appears in a cameo, but the fake moustache – which morphs into the shape of a bat by the end – is distracting. In fact, it’s so distracting that it feels deliberate.
It's not until the film's second half that the narrative reveals its hand. We see the other parallel tracks building up to the ‘heist’ scene. Different vantage points emerge. A voice emerges. But again, it soon collapses in a heap of style-over-substance tropes
There are a handful of moments where Kuttey shows glimpses of what it hoped to be. Like when the character of Arjun Kapoor sings a song to his kid on the phone in a noisy quarter bar, or when a bunch of conspirators make a Whatsapp group to share ‘information’ about the heist. That’s when you sense the influence of Bhardwaj, Raghavan and Kashyap.