Crook

Vikram Bhatt's "Crook" is a catastrophic misfire that mistakes melodrama for narrative momentum and confuses immigration anxieties with compelling cinema. The premise—a street hustler given a second chance in Melbourne—had potential for genuine exploration of identity and redemption, but instead we get a bewildering mess that lurches from one contrived situation to another without logic or emotional coherence. Emraan Hashmi tries to inject some swagger into Suraj/Jai, but even his considerable charm can't salvage material this fundamentally broken. The supporting cast drowns in underwritten roles, and Neha Sharma's Suhani exists purely as a romantic MacGuffin rather than an actual character.

The film's fundamental problem is that nothing follows naturally from anything else—Suraj's decision to impersonate Romi at the airport is stupidly reckless, the gun standoff sequence feels transplanted from a different, better movie, and the Australian antagonists are sketched with such lazy, offensive stereotyping that they might as well be cardboard cutouts. Bhatt seems entirely uninterested in exploring the psychological or cultural dimensions of his protagonist's journey; instead, he stacks incident upon incident like a schoolchild playing with building blocks, hoping something might accidentally cohere. The cinematography of Melbourne is occasionally pretty, but even location beauty can't compensate for a script that treats its own plot twists with indifference.

Rating: 4/10