Dacoit review: Tries balancing romance and revenge, doesn't quite hit the mark

Adivi Sesh's Dacoit, despite strong performances and technical highs, is held back by its inability to blend its dual tones of love and action.

In Short

• Adivi Sesh’s Dacoit faced delays and casting changes
• The film balances menace and romance but impresses with neither
• Strong first half screenplay loses pace in the second half

Adivi Sesh has built a reputation that works against him in the best possible way. As an actor, writer, and self-confessed cinephile, he has set a bar high enough that the moment a project of his is announced, audiences arrive with expectations already packed. After nearly three years, multiple casting changes, delays, and the usual production chaos, Dacoit finally made it to theatres. The title promises menace. The tagline, Oka Prema Katha, promises romance. Trying to honour both, the film ends up fully delivering neither.

Haridas, known as Hari (Adivi Sesh), has spent 13 years in prison nursing a grudge against the woman he holds responsible for his situation, his ex-girlfriend Juliet, also known as Saraswati (Mrunal Thakur). What exactly landed him there, what his revenge looks like, and whether he pulls it off forms the spine of the film.

On paper, that is a genuinely compelling premise. The story is not new, the conflicts and the character motivations are things Telugu cinema has visited before. But the way they are assembled in the first half shows Sesh's hand as a writer. The screenplay is well-structured, the characters are given proper weight, and the first half moves with real purpose and pace.

There are two solid twists in the second half that, on paper, are genuinely well-designed. They should land hard. On screen, they do not, not because the ideas are weak, but because the screenplay leading into them does not do the emotional groundwork. The feeling arrives before the investment does, and that gap is costly.

The trouble is the world the story is placed in. Dacoit is set along the Andhra-Karnataka border, but it looks and feels like the outskirts of Hyderabad on a good day. The styling, the sets, the people, everything reads urban. That disconnect between the context the story demands and what the camera is actually showing is a persistent and damaging one. The accent and dialogue compounds the problem.

The robberies, which should be the pulse of a film literally called Dacoit, are surprisingly underwhelming in the second half. There are police, there is shooting, there is choreographed chaos, but it all feels oddly low-stakes. Walk in, take the money, walk out. The emotional beats within the action, particularly the interval fight and the market sequence, do land well. But those moments needed the thriller machinery around them to be working properly, and it simply isn’t.

The larger issue is something we are increasingly seeing in recent films, like Thalapathy Vijay’s Leo—a tendency to be too many things at once, and in doing so, not fully satisfying any of them. The love and action should blend seamlessly, but by the second half, it becomes clear that this balance exists only in the idea of the film, not in its execution.

Here's the trailer:

Adivi Sesh and Mrunal Thakur do the heavy lifting here, and they do it well enough to keep you watching. Sesh delivers in the emotional scenes, and his trademark screen presence remains intact. The problem, however, is that he looks too polished for the world Dacoit is trying to build. But it is not entirely on the actor, because the world itself suffers from the same issue. You never quite forget that you are watching Sesh playing a dacoit, rather than Hari as a lived-in character. The dubbing by Chinmayi Sripada for Mrunal’s character creates a similar distance, pulling you slightly out of the performance at moments that require full immersion.

Mrunal Thakur as Saraswati is the most believable thing in the film’s world. Her character shifts across different emotional registers throughout the film, and she handles each transition with enough conviction to remind you that she is a proper performer, not just a presence. She is the most believable thing in the film. Anurag Kashyap is decent but underused. Prakash Raj and Sunil are closer to wasted opportunities, given little consequence to do.

Debut director Shaneil Deo handles the material with reasonable confidence, and his collaboration with Sesh on the screenplay produces enough engaging moments to keep the film from falling apart. But the co-writing partnership also shares responsibility for the tonal and structural imbalance that holds the film back.

Danush Bhaskar’s cinematography is the film’s most consistent strength, with the chase and action sequences shot with real flair. Gyaan’s background score stands as a strong pillar, elevating several moments effectively. However, Bheems Ceciroleo’s music disappoints. A story like this truly deserves a love song that can reshape the emotional graph of the characters, and that is missing.

The special song featuring Pawan Singh and Jonita Gandhi is poorly placed and fails to serve its purpose. In contrast, the Kannepettaro remix, paired with the title card sequence, is a genuine highlight—the kind of moment that gives you goosebumps and makes you wish the rest of the film matched that energy.

Dacoit is a film with a good idea at its centre and a writer-actor at its helm who clearly knows cinema. But knowing what a film should be and successfully putting it on screen are two different things. The first half earns your attention, the second half spends it unevenly, and you leave the theatre thinking about what it could have been rather than what it was.

- Ends