Kennedy begins with a man sitting alone in a luxurious Mumbai apartment peeling an apple with a knife. There is a menacing stillness about him. Soon enough, the blood begins to flow. Uday Shetty, who reinvents himself as Kennedy, is no ordinary murderer. He is a man who kills with such ease that even his colleagues in the police force seem a little wary.
Once he is out of uniform, Uday becomes a blunt instrument for the corrupt commissioner. He shoots, stabs, bludgeons, suffocates. Another character refers to him as Yamraj.
His cinema has revelled in blood and broken bodies but in Kennedy , the child-like glee and shock of some of his earlier work, is missing. In many of the scenes, the camera is placed at a distance from the bloodshed. Kennedy is a killer but the world he inhabits is so corrupt that becoming a murderer for hire almost seems like a legitimate response. The evil that the narrative hints at is much larger and all-encompassing β in one scene, a character asks: "Yeh desh kaun chala raha hai Who is running this this country?
In another superbly staged sequence, a young man harangues his father to buy him a motorcycle. Kennedy works as an atmospheric mood piece β the cinematography by Sylvester Fonseca is superb. Besides the songs, Anurag also uses elaborate orchestral music recorded by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
Rahul Bhat, playing the titular character, uses his imposing physicality with skill but he also enables us to empathize with a man powered by his worst instincts. Sunny Leone as Charlie has a veneer of artificiality that works for the character β a deeply damaged woman who is doing what she can to survive. Kennedy is set during the Covid-era and in many scenes, characters wear masks. There is no escape for him from himself or the many he has killed.
