Review: Danish Sait’s ‘One Cut, Two Cut’ Works as Satire, Fails as a Comedy

Vamsidhar Bhogaraju’s One Cut, Two Cut, produced by Puneeth Rajkumar’s PRK Productions, has an intriguing premise- an arts and crafts professor Gopi (Danish Sait) is stuck in a hostage situation on his first day at a school and a comedy of errors (is supposed to) ensue.

The school is taken hostage by four people in Money Heist inspired-outfits- Pruthviraj (Prakash Belawadi), Neha (Roopa Rayappa), Ayan (Vineeth Kumar), and Gurudev (Manosh Sen Gupta). Pruthviraj is an All India Radio host who is disenchanted with his job and holds a grudge against Amitabh Bachchan.

Why? He was apparently hired instead of Amitabh when he was rejected by AIR and strongly believes he’d be a star if Amitabh had gotten the job instead. He is the embodiment of, ‘...or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain’, and his one-sided beef leads to some comical scenes.

One Cut, Two Cut is a satirical comedy but it just isn’t funny barring a few jokes that probably land because the bar has been set low enough. It’s a shame since the film has not one, but two comedians (to my knowledge).

Danish Sait, equipped with a Charlie Chaplin moustache, as Gopi goes from amusing to jarring over the film’s 88 minute runtime and if anything, the film is a testament to Chaplin’s talent because it’s clear that the moustache didn’t make the comedian, the comedian made the moustache.

Danish's Gopi acts as the middleman between the Chief Minister’s Secretary (Sampath Maitreya) and the hostage-takers, in a role similar to his Asgar in French Biriyani (yes, that was a better character). It’s understandable that Gopi is supposed to be a caricature and he tries to make it work, but the script is just not on his side.

As a satire, the film deserves appreciation. The four hostage-takers’ clashing ideologies portray how most people eventually put the self over the common good under the garb of ‘morality’.

The film makes astute observations about the beef ban and the bit about boiled eggs being removed from the kids’ meals is timely.

However, the characters slip in and out of their caricatures. Neha’s character is a ‘proud North Indian from Hyderabad’ and she sticks to her caricature for about five minutes.

Sampath Maitreya and Prakash Belawadi give impressive performances. Aruna Balraj as the disgruntled teacher Subbalakshmi and Samyuktha Hornad as Nagaveni are the best, in their limited scenes.

Vamsidhar Bhogaraju’s antics as the head of the sleeper agents and Soundarya Nagaraj’s frustration at her boss and job also manage to elicit a few laughs. One interaction between Gopi and Pruthviraj recreating the ‘Tumhare paas kya hai’ scene from Deewar is humorous but still, it’s slim pickings when it comes to jokes.

One Cut, Two Cut had the potential to do much more but it seems like the script was spread too thin to mine jokes and everything else fell apart.

One Cut, Two Cut is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.