Rashmi Rocket review: An instantly forgettable sports drama that is mildly watchable in parts

Akarsh Khurana's Rashmi Rocket, the story of an athlete who challenges the archaic and unscientific methods of gender verification, is sometimes engaging but predictable and slightly too conscious of its commercial-entertainer tag for its own good, which ends up diluting the film's impact.

The film begins with two male police officers barging into a female athlete's hostel claiming to have received a complaint about a male entering the establishment illegally. They drag Taapsee Pannu's character, Rashmi, out of her room, slap her and throw her into their jeep.

Rashmi, who rides a Royal Enfield Bullet in a leather jacket and wears Ray-Ban sunglasses, is a part-time tour guide in Kutch. She exhibits all the qualities generally associated with men. She is short-tempered and has no qualms about resorting to violence. She lives with her mother Bhanuben (Supriya Pathak).

The story begins when Rashmi is appointed as a tour guide for army captain Gagan Thakur (Priyanshu Painyuli) and his two subordinates. Gagan is also a track-and-field trainer and it doesn't take him long to realize that Rashmi is a natural athlete. With some encouragement from Gagan, Rashmi decides to participate in state-level athletic tournaments. She soon breaks all national records and becomes the talk of the country.

But everything is snatched away in a matter of seconds when she is accused of lying about her gender and competing in women's games. What follows is her being subjected to a slew of archaic tests to ascertain if she is a woman.

The screenplay by Aniruddha Guha and Kanika Dhillon rarely deviates from the traditional, familiar path, especially in the first half. The writing then gets lazier and lacks novelty. Even the filmmaking is quite basic. The screenplay is written in such a way that it treats each scene separately. Every scene seems to have its own beginning, middle and end, with each one starting on a different note. Also, it would have been better if the makers had avoided blatant product placement. There is a mention of the online learning website UpGrad, which was launched in 2015, but the film's story is set before 2014. These small things take you out of the film.

Though Rashmi Rocket is the story of a woman who challenges the archaic and unscientific methods of gender verification, it's also a sports drama. And it seems that the director decided to completely neglect this aspect. The training montages and actual sprinting sessions are shot and directed in a shoddy manner. They don't induce any kind of tension or thrill even when the stakes are high. The editing also leaves much to be desired.

The film is almost divided into two halves. While the first half is treated as a sports drama about Rashmi's rise in the world of Indian sports, the second turns into a courtroom drama with some heavy dialoguebaazi. This reviewer enjoyed the second half a lot more, despite its predictability and the presence of some unnecessary commercial elements.

Even Khurana's staging and blocking improve in the second half, almost as if the director was more comfortable shooting in a confined space indoors. Another thing that is bothersome is the dialogues. Instead of a simple, organic conversation between people, everything feels like well-rehearsed exchanges.

Once again, Pannu is tasked with carrying the film on her shoulders and for the most part she succeeds, but there are a few scenes where she tries too hard to display her manly traits. Painyuli's Gagan seems like a role reversal of female characters in sports movies. Apart from being supportive of his lady love, he doesn't have much to do.

Then there is a lawyer played by Abhishek Banerjee. His character takes the story forward in the second half and the director has also used him as the sole comic relief to make sure the tone doesn't become too dark. But this sometimes works against the film, because he cracks jokes in scenes that would have been more impactful if they had let the tension simmer a bit more.

Overall, Rashmi Rocket is a mixed bag. An instantly forgettable sports drama, it is mildly watchable but is far too familiar to stand out from other such films.

Rashmi Rocket is being streamed on Zee5.