Double iSmart Review - Not Even Half as Entertaining as its First Part!

Ashwin Ram

Double iSmart is a successor to the 2019 hit film iSmart Shankar. Starring Ram Pothineni, Kavya Thapar and Sanjay Dutt in the lead roles. Directed by Puri Jagannadh.

Premise:

Sanjay Dutt is an International criminal who suffers from a brain tumor. He wishes to be immortal for which he decides for a memory transfer operation with Ram Pothineni. What happens after they accomplish it successfully forms the remaining story.

Writing/ Direction:

Everybody wants to live longer, the film begins with the same point when Sanjay Dutt says so. But they could have left him with that simple attitude rather than giving him an aim of separating India into two. And turns out the entire game is Ram Pothineni’s master plan, strongly reminiscent of the Pokkiri climax twist. The first part had a fresh idea with a solid intent that was implemented in a commercially viable manner. Just to give a little tweak to the concept, they changed it as memory sharing here instead of memory transfer. There was a clear-cut goal in the predecessor that was established at an early stage, the little mystery it carried had a justification to be revealed towards the end, here everything is dumped for the final act and it feels there is no content in the film for most part. A film should be minimally logical, or entertaining enough for us to not question it, this one fails to cover both. Ali gets a standalone comedy track that frequently appears in the movie till the pre-climax, there is absolutely no purpose to it and just rarely funny. There’s a mother sentiment flashback out of nowhere narrated with KGF music. The approach is evident, but there should be some sort of creativity in writing rather than throwing all the dumb sex jokes.

Performances:

 Job well done by Ram Pothineni by switching his character from one SIM card to the other, by working on the attitude, body language and dialogue delivery. Kavya Thapar is like a glam doll on-screen, gets an inconsistent characterization, however she struggles to express. Sanjay Dutt stands like a rock there, doesn’t emote or does anything useful to better his villain role, guess man was so disinterested.

Technicalities:

Lackluster music, the songs are very ordinary, even the dance numbers are not foot-tapping. Background score is repetitive and offers nothing special. Camera department is somewhat okay, the night shots are fairly neat and otherwise fine too. Editing is a complete misfire, there are many places to rework, the film could easily be 1 whole hour crisper and still there won’t be any difference. No elevation in the fight sequences as the treatment was lethargic. VFX is poor, the green mat technology used for the foreign sequences look so fake.

Bottomline

An exciting idea which we were introduced to in its predecessor is completely wasted with relentless scenes such as mother sentiment and track comedies. The execution of the core plot is also randomly done.

Rating - 1.5/ 5