4 min readFeb 20, 2026 03:41 PM IST
Kennedy movie review: A cab driver who calls himself Kennedy glides silently through Mumbai’s nights, picking up rides, eavesdropping on conversations, leading to murder and mayhem.
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The irony of the name– of an assassinated US president– being tacked on to a contemporary assassin is not hidden. It is underlined, in keeping with the baroque background score and the poetry by Amir Aziz that layer this pulp thriller, which blurs the line between fact and fiction.
Kennedy (Rahut Bhat), who once used to be family man called Uday Shetty with a wife and kids, now wears a scarlet tie, and a mask: it is the pandemic, and masks are being used to keep the deadly virus at bay, as well as to hide the dark deeds dreamt up by a corrupt city police commissioner (Mohit Takalkar), who’s priority to keep himself afloat, even as people around him are drowning.
Who is Kennedy? Whose orders is he executing? Is he an unfeeling puppet, or are his puppet master’s strings attached to someone else’s hands? And who is the gorgeous Charlie (Sunny Leone), a woman who floats about tipsily, a high-pitched giggle here, a hiccupy slide there.
The film’s hero is a killing machine, and one of the film’s most impactful sequences is the decimation– no other word for it– of a family: that the urge to kill can be transmitted from one human to the other evident in the face of the son who demands a motorcycle from his father, knowing he will never get it. The nihilism evident in every frame of this Taxi Driver coded cop-gangta saga is so heightened here that it nearly swallows the rest of the film.
Anurag Kashyap’s noir thriller, with strong political undertones, wants to be a rumination on the moral ruins of a nation, overtaken by greedy oligarchs and their slaves. Setting it and shooting it during the pandemic (the film was ready in 2023, and was showcased in the midnight section of the Cannes film festival) lends it a sparse quality, with a city usually overflowing with humanity having turned into an empty shell.
It is an angry film, which feels like an echo of the filmmaker’s own voice, with characters speaking about ‘bade papa in Mumbai’ and ‘kathputli hai hamaari sarkar’. At one point, it comes off like a diatribe, but a righteous one, echoing those who feel strongly about our times. There are explicit references to those who own ‘bijli and paani’ and the very air we breathe, and ‘taalis’ and ‘thaalis’. Three years back, when we first heard them, these lines felt brave; today, the inclusion of these kinds of sentiments in a feature would be a near impossibility.
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Bhat, returning to Kashyap’s fold after Ugly, pitches in a muscular performance, coasting on a dead-eyed stare and gravelly voice, but remains curiously impassive. After that first unexpected giggle in an elevator, Leone lapses into similarity. After a point, though, the rage dissipates. The music, such a powerfully integral part of the story, trails off. As does the film.
Kennedy movie cast: Rahul Bhat, Sunny Leone, Mohit Takalkar, Shrikant Yadav, Abhilash Thapliyal, Aamir Dalvi
Kennedy movie director: Anurag Kashyap
Kennedy movie rating: Two and a half stars
