Murder 2
- Director
- Mohit Suri
- Studio
- Vishesh Films
- Release Date
- 7 July 2011
- Running Time
- 130 min
- Language
- Hindi
- Country
- India
- Budget
- ₹13.00 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹67.84 Cr
Review
Anurag Kashyap's *Murder 2* operates in that dangerous territory where exploitation masquerades as psychological thriller, and frustratingly, it almost gets away with it. The film's central conceit—a morally compromised protagonist navigating a serial killer's underworld—has genuine potential, especially in how it mirrors the moral numbness of characters like Arjun (Emraan Hashmi delivering his usual smoldering detachment) against the raw depravity of Dheeraj's crimes. There's a provocative argument buried here about complicity and desensitization in contemporary Mumbai, but Kashyap undermines it by treating violence as spectacle rather than consequence. The direction oscillates between moments of genuine tension—the well sequences carry an unsettling claustrophobia—and gratuitous brutality that feels designed to provoke rather than illuminate. Jacqueline Fernandez's Priya remains largely decorative, a missed opportunity to complicate the narrative's treatment of women.
What ultimately sinks the film is its structural collapse in the final act and its troubling relationship with its own subject matter. The serial killer genre demands either restraint (like *7* or *Kahaani*) or unflinching psychological depth (*Udta Punjab* achieved this viscerally), but *Murder 2* settles for sensationalism without insight. Hashmi's performance—competent but predictable in the Emraan Hashmi mold—never transcends the material enough to make Arjun's moral arc compelling. The film makes ₹67.84
Storyline
So this movie kicks off with this shady former cop named Arjun who's basically a morally bankrupt guy making money through all kinds of illegal stuff. He's got this weird thing where he donates to orphans at church to feel good about himself, even though he's totally corrupt. That's where he meets Priya, this gorgeous model, and they start hooking up casually. But here's the thing—Arjun's not interested in anything real with her, and he basically tells her to move on if she wants actual love because he's all about keeping things completely casual and detached.
Meanwhile, there's this terrifying serial killer on the loose who's been targeting and murdering women in the most horrific ways imaginable, dumping their bodies in this creepy well. Arjun gets involved when a gangster and pimp named Sameer hires him to figure out what happened to all his missing girls. While digging into it, Arjun discovers a phone number connected to the disappearances and they decide to send a girl to investigate—a young woman named Reshma who's new to the business and doing it to support her struggling family in secret.
When Reshma gets sent to the killer's house, she encounters this absolutely deranged psychopath named Dheeraj who's been responsible for all the torture and murders. He captures her and throws her into that same dark well he's been using as his killing ground. Once Arjun figures out that Dheeraj's the one doing all this, he tips off the cops and gets them to arrest him, but then things take an unexpected turn when the police commissioner gets involved.
