Forensic movie review: Vikrant Massey, Radhika Apte starrer is slow-paced crime drama with a shoddy screenplay

In today’s age and time where psychological drama has taken a big leap in OTT space, the recently released ZEE5 ’s movie Forensic dates back to the slow-paced unrealistic storyline. Despite having powerhouses Vikrant Massey and Radhika Apte as the lead cast, the film fails to leave an impression owing to its poor screenplay and editing.

Directed by Vishal Furia , Forensic is the Hindi remake of his Malayalam movie of the same name that starred Tovino Thomas and Mamta Mohandas in the lead roles. While Vikrant stepped into the shoes of Tovino to play a rather cool forensic science officer, Radhika essayed the role of a police officer as Mamta played in the 2020 film. The case of little girls getting kidnapped on their birthdays and later killed by a vicious serial killer is jointly solved by the police officer and a forensic expert in this cringy thriller.

Being considered the best forensic expert, Johnny M Khanna (Vikrant) is called Mussoorie to solve the murder of a little girl. The case happens to be under his ex-girlfriend and police officer Megha Sharma(Radhika Apte). Then follows the cliched scenes of the two reminiscing their past love affair. The lackluster chemistry did nothing much to evoke emotions and immediately shifted focus to the loosely handled crime scene. Vindu Dara Singh and Suneet Borah’s character as a police constable tries hard to add light humour but falls flat.

The first half seems to be quite stretchy and takes too long to build characters. However, some bits of forensic science make it bearable. The weak script did not offer talented actors Vikrant and Radhika anything extraordinary. Also, watching Rohit Bose Roy after a long time on the big screen certainly raises the hope, but soon the craze dies down in the second half. As if Rohit only had to weep throughout, basically having no substantial role. Instead, child artist Harbandana Kaur, who played the role of his daughter, pulled off the character, suffering from post-traumatic stress, quite well. Even child artist Nikhil Chawla made his presence felt in however short screentime he got.

Prachi Desai rather made a not-so-impressive comeback or better to say that she did not let down either. She does a decent job as a child psychiatrist in a few scenes but failed miserably especially in the second half when she actually needed to act with nuances. Anant Mahadevan fits well as her step-father, whereas Subrata Dutta and Jatin Siyal as police officers also did a fair job.

The director did retain some interesting bits from his original film. But the addition of a few unwanted scenes like the car chasing scene between Vikrant and Subrata, also a few wrongly placed romantic scenes made Vishal Kapoor’s screenplay weak. Adhir Bhatt’s dialogues and Abhijeet Deshpande’s editing could have been better. In a nutshell, Forensic has no USP except for seasoned actors Vikrant and Radhika. The crime drama lacks depth and emotions, a tauter presentation could have helped to make it an edge-of-the-seat-thriller.