'The Buckingham Murders' Review: Kareena Kapoor is brilliant in a dull film

There are two kinds of cop films. One, where the protagonist is a trigger-happy Dirty Harry who delivers snappy one-liners and cleans up the bad guys with a devil-may-care attitude. The other is where the central character is brooding, intense and intellectually driven, grappling with personal demons while solving intricate cases. Kareena Kapoor plays the second kind in The Buckingham Murders directed by Hansal Mehta. In both types of films, you can often anticipate the journey of the flawed hero, the challenges they will encounter, and the eventual resolution they will reach.

This film is no different.

Unlike what the title suggests, the story doesn’t have anything to do with the British Royal family. Instead, it refers to murders in Buckinghamshire, a county in South East England. A Sikh boy is found dead and the immediate suspect is a Muslim teen in a town that is already simmering with communal tensions. In comes a British Asian policewoman Jaspreet Bhamra (Kareena Kapoor) who dives deep into the proceedings though she herself is grieving from the loss of her child in a senseless murder caused by drug abuse.

Needless to say, her path isn’t smooth. She has to put up with a cynical colleague Hardy (Ash Tandon) with past secrets, disgruntled community members and dysfunctional families. In this town, still waters run deep here and everyone has a motive with religious identity and the subsequent mistrust between groups playing a central part.

Yet, The Buckingham Murders is not a typical police procedural with a tenacious cop going about her investigation methodically. The script packs in a lot of themes - personal loss, grief, disharmony, drugs, misogyny the British Asian experience in the UK’s underbelly and youth crime. But while that seems a great prospect for serious cinema lovers who want their stories to be told in a raw and unvarnished manner, The Buckingham Murders fails to engage you because the narrative is so dreary.

To be fair, Aseem Arrroa, Raghav Raj Kakker and Kashyap Kapoor’s plot has all the right elements to make for a gripping watch. Films with serious themes do not need to scream their message loud as silence can often speak volumes than whistle-worthy dialogues and eye-popping action scenes. The problem here is the screenplay which simply fails to evoke any emotion from you. You don’t feel involved with either Jas’ grief or with the dead child’s parents’ (Ranveer Brar and Prabhleen Sandhu) angst. The sub-plots including an extra marital affair seem rather contrived. And when the big reveal about the identity of the real murderer takes place, it doesn’t bring the shock that it should.

Watching The Buckingham Murders reminded me of another movie that dealt with similar themes of bereavement, crime and seeking redemption through solving a complex case. The underrated 2012 thriller Talaash starring Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Rani Mukerji and directed by Reema Kagti wove in disparate themes beautifully bringing forth a layered exploration of human emotions while keeping the viewer engaged throughout. This is not a comparison but somewhere one feels The Buckingham Murders had similar potential but failed to act on it. The film criss-crosses between a sociological drama and a crime thriller ending up becoming neither. And that’s a pity because the man helming it is Hansal Mehta who had managed to strike the perfect balance between entertainment, realism and social messaging with films like Shahid and web series such as Scam 92 and Scoop.

On the plus side, the cinematography captures the blue, grey small British town atmosphere well. It’s a world far removed from the glossy, colourful and happy realms of NRI life painted by the likes of Karan Johar. On the contrary, it is bleak, melancholic and rather, hopeless – the way real life often is in these areas.

The casting needs special mention. After a long time we have a diverse cast with black and white supporting characters each of who play their part well. Thankfully, the makers refrain from having everyone speak in Hindi despite the story being set outside India as is the case often with Bollywood. The dialogues are mostly in English, each character speaking in their own accents, which might alienate a large part of non-English speaking audience but lends authenticity to the narrative.

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