Lost without a rudder

David
Kannada (Theatres)
Director - Shreyas Chinga
Cast - Shreyas Chinga, Avinash, Sarah Harish, Peter Grabinsky
Rating- 1.5/5

By portraying friendships without depth, relationships without criticality, cut-throat mercantilism without detail and a murder case without practicality, ‘David’ gets harder to watch with each new twist and turn, exactly when a crime-thriller is expected to keep its audience glued to their seats.

The film starts with a brief but summarised portrayal of three disjointed stories — a gang of easy-going and money-hungry college boys, led by Amati (Rakshith Adiga) — Gowtham (Shreyas Chinga), and his two friends facing contrasting experiences in love life — and a ruthless businessman Vikram Shetty (Pratap Narayan) keen on pushing aside his father’s friend and business tycoon Upen Sharma (Avinash) to further his ambitions.

All three plots collide at the point when Sharma is murdered and his daughter Shreya, also Gowtham’s sweetheart, is abducted, supposedly by Amati’s gang. The film then sketches Gowtham’s attempt to unearth the real killer and save his love, in the process coming across two Davids, both with different motives for murder. With the crux of the story involving an intersection of four sub-plots, its biggest letdown is in failing to coherently link those different threads, resulting in a half-boiled narrative. The over-emphasis on unnecessary sequences also means that none of the characters are portrayed well, coming out as too amateurish and unrealistic.

While Shreyas Chinga can be credited for picking up a challenging plot, he stands to blame for letting down the execution as the director cum protagonist. The supporting cast fails to shine as most of the actors seem like ‘fish out of water’ while the seniors in it — Avinash and the late Bullet Prakash- have very limited screen space to make up for it.

All in all, ‘David’, just like its eponymous 17-year-old antagonist addicted to drugs, goes astray in all directions.