Film: Black Friday

Director: Anurag Kashyap

Cast:  Kay Kay Menon, Pavan Malhotra, Imtiaz Ali, Aditya Shrivastava

Rating: 3.5/5

It almost seems like a beautiful and a well thought of plan, last month one saw Parzania release and this month it is Black Friday that will hit the theatres; both films swearing to recreate the horrific events of the Gujarat carnage and the Mumbai Bomb blasts respectively.

An adaptation of the book written by S.Hussain Zaidi under the same title, the movie like the book claims to reveal the truth behind the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts.

As kids one could imagine playing the game of ‘Police and robber’, fast forward all those years and you will find yourself not playing the game but merely viewing it as a spectator on the silver screen.

Black Friday is one such film, that does not analyze whether the incident that occurred was right or wrong, it does not while time trying to sentence the accused through the medium of cinema. It simply states the point and that too in a very objective fashion, leaving us to come up with the answers to our very own questions.

The movie brilliantly tracks the suspects involved in the blasts through the narrative of Inspector Rakesh Maria essayed by Kay Kay Mennon, each character is introduced as the investigation gets more intense and progresses. Names such as Tiger Memon, Badshah Khan, Yakub Memon and Bashir Khan are thrown up as the masterminds behind the blast. After establishing the suspects and the prime accused, the movie begins traversing across Dubai, Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, following the suspects; this is where the narrative moves over to the point of view of Badshah Khan (Aditya Srivastava) another prime accused in the 1993 Mumbai blasts. At this point one sees the incident through the eyes of the accused, where each one is hurrying to head away underground, hoping to be spared of a sentence and trial.