HIT: The First Case is a detailed police procedural. You’ll get to know what all policemen do to solve murder cases. You’ll be glad to know that they have a forensic lab to match anything that the FBI has, and that too, in Jaipur. You’ll come to know how a polygraph test is taken and how a narco analysis is performed. It’ll increase your general knowledge for sure. Director Dr. Sailesh Kolanu has reimagined his own Telugu film, of the same name, with minor changes. While the original was set in Telangana, here the action shifts to Jaipur. Like in the original, here too we meet a genius police officer, Vikram (Rajkummar Rao), belonging to the Homicide Intervention Team (HIT), who is suffering from PTSD because of something that happened in his past. He keeps seeing flashes of the past tragedy, and the sight of fire kind of paralyses him. All this is affecting his work. His girlfriend, Neha (Sanya Malhotra), who is an officer with the forensics department, tells him to take a break for the sake of everyone. His colleagues, even his shrink, advise him to do the same. Feeling that he’s being alienated, he runs off to his ancestral home in the mountains. After two months of isolation, he learns that Neha has disappeared and comes back to handle the matter. A few days ago, another girl disappeared as well, and Neha was investigating the case. Thinking that both the cases are related, he begins to look into the earlier case as well, and all sorts of secrets come tumbling out.
The director tries to keep you on your toes throughout. The suspects include a suspended police officer, Ibrahim (Milind Gunaji), who was the last person who saw the girl, a divorcee (Shilpa Shukla), who is too much bothered about society’s alienation of her; and even the girl’s parents, when it’s learnt she’d been adopted. While the police chief (Dalip Tahil) is more or less in his favour, Vikram finds himself at loggerheads with another HIT officer (Jatin Goswami). Several red herrings later, he chances upon the reason behind the disappearance of both the girls. By this time, the proceedings have become so convoluted that the viewer has lost most of his interest.
The film is lopsided, to say the least. While it does apprise us about the inner workings of a police investigation, it’s filled with characters that are so one-dimensional that they might as well be mannequins. There’s no justification for the friction between Vikram and his colleague. We have no idea why Shilpa Shukla’s character behaved the way she did, and the reason behind another colleague’s behaviour too boggles the mind. Sanya Malhotra is absent for most of the film. They could have at least shown her predicament from her point of view, but we don’t get that at all.
Sanya Malhotra shines like a ray of sunshine in this otherwise bleak film. She shares a palpable chemistry with Rajkummar Rao, and we wish there was more of her to see in the film. It’s all set for a sequel, so hopefully we’ll see her in a better role in the next film. Rajkummar Rao has the habit of rising above the constraints of the script, and he does it again in this film. He’s a method actor and brings all his craft into play here, playing a grief-stricken, angst-filled cop with every ounce of creativity in his possession. He’s the best thing about the film and keeps you invested in the project through sheer dint of effort.