Bob Biswas in Sujoy Ghosh’s 2012 Kahaani was the unctuous, seemingly inoffensive, nondescript Bob Biswas. If you passed him by on the street, you would not even notice him, an enviable quality in a contract killer. Mr. Biswas fulfilled his assignments with efficiency, showing up wherever he was required to be, pulling out his gun, and shooting his victim neatly between the eyes. Saswata Chatterjee played him with a smiling menace: you would not want to meet this man in an empty alley.

This time around, Abhishek Bachchan plays the life insurance agent who makes a living by taking lives. We smile morbidly, as we are meant to. The body count is higher than the previous film, the cold-bloodedness of the killings rivaling even the most hard-edged Hollywood thrillers. There are real stakes that this new Bob faces as he goes about his business: not just his own life, but the lives of those he loves most, his wife and children, can be at serious risk.

The character, Bob, created by Sujoy, does not bat an eyelid before the bullet from his revolver flies, knocking a man or woman dead and cold. His aim is bang on, and he never regrets his bloody actions. But this was before he slipped into a coma after a nasty accident in Diya’s (Sujoy’s daughter) debut thriller. When he wakes him, he has lost his memory, and Diya makes him softer, gentler, pruning his maleficence to a great degree. We almost begin to nurture empathy for him and want him to live.

Diya’s work begins with Bob waking up. He has been in a comatose state for eight years, and when he gets up he is completely lost. His wife, Mary Biswas, played brilliantly by Chitrangada Singh, takes him home. They have a little son, Benny (Ronith Arora), and a teenage daughter, Mini (Samara Tijori). She is studying to get into a medical course, and her neighbor, practicing for a musical competition, disturbs her concentration every night. He is dogmatic and would not listen when asked to keep his volume low or shut his window looking out at Bob’s flat. He shoots him dead in what seems like a reflex action that comes naturally to him!

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The screenplay is compelling, well-helmed, and crisply edited with some very interesting characters like Kali Da (Paran Bandopadhyay), who runs a homeopathic pharmacy – where Bob is ordered by some strange-looking men to get his “Nux-Vomica". The packet he gets contains not the medicine but bullets and a gun. Bob, still clueless about who he is, gets pushed around into doing what he is not comfortable with. He is given the photograph of the man or woman he is to assassinate. And he goes on a Kill Bill spree.

The plot is neatly tied, no loose ends here, with some mind-blowing performances; Bandopadhyay’s is certainly one, and Singh undoubtedly another. She is captivating as a woman mystified by Bob’s mood swings. Bachchan Jr is good, perhaps one of his finest performances, but viewers would tend to compare him with Chatterjee. Abhishek is no match for the vile that Kahaani’s Bob exuded with a smile that hid the Devil. He showed no emotion, only a cold and calculating demeanour. Diya, by clothing her Bob with humanness robs the character’s core strength of being a ruthless murderer. In fact, very few are likely to remember her Bob, and Bachchan could be eclipsed by Chatterjee. One will shudder with the thouht of that murderous glint in his eyes.

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