Movie Review: Fredrick
Homosexuality hasn't always played a great role in action thrillers. If you discount the sordid basement rape in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, man on man action hasn't really been part of the guns, cars, chases line of thought. Yet that's exactly what makes Fredrick so exotic. It's a pedantic thriller that has gay men at it's center. And you don't know which is doing disservice to the other. So in the end you just resign to the fate of cheap thrills and you watch a cop fighting bad guys as he weeps away to glory.
If your head's preparing to emote something in the region of "OMFG... Whaat?", you're moving in the right direction. The narrative of Fredrick does leave you a bit stupefied. You don't really know why all of the bad things happened. You get why certain people die in this film, but you don't get why is it all important to the story. So a young lad named Manav witnesses his Dad killing his lover, who's also a boy. He has a violent reaction and ends up killing the father. Many years later, said boy helps out another young chap, a cop, in his investigation to crack a human trafficking gang, because said gang has the cop's sister. In another Tarantino inspired subplot, the cop's wife is a kickass lady cop who can beat you black and blue and look good doing it too. She's on the case as well. Unknown to all the characters, there's the mystery of Fredrick who's the leader of the human trafficking gang in question. But no one knows who he is. Or do they? Need a clue? He's gay. Before you go thinking in the direction of Al Pacino's luscious gay movie Cruising, this isn't that either. It's just a mish mash of good ideas executed in the worst possible way.
The music is preposterous and completely out of tune with the thriller. The background score is loud. The cinematography is okay. The action looks nice but the character reactions sucker punch the life out of you. Prashant Narayanan plays a complex role and despite his best efforts, he doesn't always seem convincing. New guy Avinash Dhyan plays the weepy cop who's basically Liam Neeson from Taken with hormonal imbalance. Tuhina Butalia's action moves are as exotic as her name. The performances don't really matter.
The writing and the direction on this film are so convoluted the actors have nothing left, but to curl up and wait for the inevitable. The viewer though has the challenge of figuring out what the exact point of the story was. Watch this if you enjoy being perplexed.