- Date of Release: 10 April 2026
- Genre: Action, Drama, Romance, Thriller
- Language: Telugu / Hindi (Review Is Of The Hindi Version)
- Watch On: Theatres Only
Dacoit: A Love Story
Introduction
It remains a metaverse of madness for reel-life love stories featuring characters that borrow their names from real-life ones. If a film that O’Romeo (2026) featured a sloppy love story of a ‘Laila’ who wished to avenge her past from her ‘Majnu’ from another world, it is the turn of ‘Juliet’ who is at the receiving end of the madness here. Or atleast to begin with. Early on in the new Telugu film Dacoit, you are introduced to Hari (Adivi Sesh) – a modern day Romeo who discreetly wishes to extract revenge on his Juliet aka Saraswathi (Mrunal Thakur). The tropes remain simple and sloppy, even as you see the protagonist exercizing in jail – a dated metaphor to showcase his commitment to revenge. A little flashback tells us a little more about the protagonists (supposedly so) – he belongs to the lower caste, she belongs to the upper caste, there is no …*cough*.. plenty of chemistry between the couple, only for them to fall in love and later suffer a blow that lands him in prison, and her heartbroken. The subtext though lies in how you feel nothing about the characters or their love story – it is so dated that it could have featured in our history textbooks of cinema. It is so poor that I already found myself fidgeting in my seat. This, while staring at my watch that told me that I was only 20 minutes into the movie. And that there were over two hours left!
Story & Screenplay
Written by Adivi Sesh, Shaneil Deo, Abburi Ravi, and Yash Eshwari, Dacoit hardly has the panache of the aura-farming character Rehman Dakait from Dhurandhar (2025). If the latter is a frontbencher, the former has essentially bunked school. If the latter was the golden-boy of a crime-induced neighbour, the former is a wannabe Roadies star who thinks he is famous already. In fact, the main issue for me remained its overstuffed structure that never really allowed me to settle on a single conflict – it started off as a revenge saga, slipped in a love story in between, expanded into a crime heist, introduced an organ trafficking subplot at the hospital, only to pivot back to an already non-existential love story that only swung for thin air.
The core of the drama reminded me of several duds from Hindi cinema that surprisingly found patronage. For instance, the toxic love story between Shankar (Dhanush) and Mukti (Kriti Sanon) in Tere Ishk Mein (2025) that felt absurdly weird. In the same breath, this revenge inducing subplot makes it the crime version of that film – only sloppier and more dated. As an example, Hari doesn’t directly extract revenge from his Juliet – he talks her into a heist given that she needs the money for her husband’s operation, only with an intention to have her arrested for the crime whilst he could keep the money. Twisted right? Or would you call it dated?
If you are still not convinced, here are some more dated tropes – the protagonist randomly dancing to a petty ‘item song’ (why Jonita Gandhi why?) immediately after escaping from the crutches of the cops in a sequence that was barely entertaining, while being unintentionally funny. In another, you see both Hari and Juliet put on a mask not because of the pandemic (ironically, the drama is set against the backdrop of Covid making everyone a ‘Dacoit’ in a way with their masks on….peak detailing), but simply because the writers wanted to make it obvious to the lowest common denominator that the heist is about to begin. Being laughable is an understatement…
One of the weakest aspects of the drama remains its characterization wherein the importance of a buildup is next to zero. So you have the boss of Hari (Atul Kulkarni) who is just there, a corrupt sidekick of a cop (Sunil Varma) who is also just there, a corrupt owner of the hospital involved in money laundering (Prakash Raj) who is also (also) just there, a cop with a badass personality but a good heart called Swamy (Anurag Kashyap) who is also (also) (also) just there for the chase, and his pretty little sidekick Janaki (Zayn Marie Khan) who is also (to the times infinity) just there. You get the gist. Oh and a twisted husband character (Vaibhav Tatwawadi) who is also (calculator crashed) just there.
What could have been either an intense love story or an intense heist thriller with a social message, turns out to be none of the above. It remained similar to a student reluctantly encircling the NOTA option in an exam, simply given how that option holds the least probability of being right. The tables flip here though, given how the probability remains the highest – with mindless and predictable twists that had me chuckling every now and then, or even a ridiculous change of setting that shifted from Andhra to Bengaluru featuring one of the characters, only to shift right back to a place in Andhra during an ongoing heist. All of this while I was wondering on how did either parties not get caught in the Bengaluru traffic?
It was miracle of a ‘peak detailing’, with an ending that was so tame and predictable without an iota of emotions that then had me scratching my head – what was the purpose of this travesty? How was it even greenlit? All of this while I kept wondering on what this ‘dacoit’ looted – my sleep and entertainment. I expected better from Adivi Sesh – what have you done, sir?ðŸ˜
Dialogues, Music & Direction
The dialogues are caught in an identity crisis of their own – never fully committing to a massy outlook while consistently being timid, and stripped off all emotions. The music and the BGM are relatively decent, atleast trying their best to elevate a drama that failed to go beyond the ground level. The high was still missing, but hey, full marks for atleast giving it a shot with this script. On a side note, there is a song whose start is eerily similar to a smash hit from last year (Hint: Saiyaara). Keep an eye on that. The cinematography tries to be stylized, but the frames always keep you at a distance from its characters and their emotions. Be it an unnecessary hand-help shaky frame involving a major incident, or the use of a long lens to depict an action sequence – the basic high that you would expect from a commercial entertainer is missing. In other words, this was a swing and a miss!
The major issue with the editing pattern wasn’t necessarily its coherence. It was an overstuffed narrative that wasn’t certain of its own identity. And that reflected with the film’s edit – it was unable to inculcate a strong emotional core that was crucial to the drama, more so while traversing from one scene to another.
Director Shaneil Deo misses the mark here and how! The conundrum of what the source material stood for is definitely visible in his craft, so much so that a major turning point in the life of the protagonist at the start, feels so tepid. That entire sequence is so poorly crafted that it left zero impact, even though that single sequence was important to the drama while unfolding like a vantage point. That aside, some of his creative choices are cliched too, with the lack of detailing that laces the narrative. Why would the protagonists wear masks to make them look shady in at the start of the heist ? (Their identity wasn’t known anyway to begin with). Why would you shift setting at the drop of a hat while hilariously placing an ‘Arthi’ (read : corpse) in front of a hospital that later encounters a random shootout ? Why are you still reading this review??
Performances
The performances are as flat as a pancake here, by the members of the cast. Kamakshi Bhaskarla as Malli is woefully wasted here (oh yeah, she was also (nevermind) just there), in what could have been such a pivotal character. The likes of Sunil Varma and Atul Kulkarni are mere spectators here, something that was such a shame here. They hardly havr anything to do. The same goes for Zayn Khan Marie as SI Janaki who has a good presence onscreen, but nothing to work with respect to her character. Prakash Raj remains a disappointment too, literally sleep-walking through his role here in a character that he has essayed a million times now (exaggeratedly speaking).
The lone shining light to an extent is Anurag Kashyap who tries to make things work even with a sketchy character like Swamy. I wish that his character arc was more than just his change of costumes from black to white, something that is intended to gel with his transformation. Vaibhav Tatwawadi had an interesting character to begin with, but given how his character shaped up eventually, there was only so much he could do with it.
Dacoit is labeled as a love story and so you expected Mrunal Thakur and Adivi Sesh to fair much better with their chemistry. But at no point did my heart reach out to their angst. Mrunal Thakur as Saraswathi aka Juliet tries to emote through her expressions and body language, but her written material never fully allows her performance to bloom.
Also, I have been a huge admirer of Adivi Sesh and his body of work, particularly given his journey of an outsider in an industry largely driven on nepotism. But he falters here in a huge way. His dialogue delivery remains flat, something that told me that he isn’t fully comfortable with the Hindi language (yes, this review is of the Hindi version of the film). Like Mrunal, he too tries hard to make things work with his expressions and body language but Adivi Sesh the writer lets Adivi Sesh the actor down. This remains a rare blemish in his otherwise impressive filmography. All eyes on Goodachari 2 (2026) now for redemption. I shall be seated with hope!
Conclusion
Don’t know about Rehman, but this Dacoit offers no entertainment in a dated and sloppy narrative that fires nothing but blanks. And this may well go down as one of the biggest disappointments of the year, a drama that literally nosedives after takeoff! Available in a theatre near you.