Double iSmart review: Puri fries our brain with double the torture

Five years after Puri Jagannadh’s iSmart Shankar (2019) comes its ‘spiritual sequel’, Double iSmart, that borrows its central premise and makes a few references here and there to the original, which wasn’t a great film to begin with. Double, though, is double the torture.

Starring Ram Pothineni as iSmart Shankar once again, the plot revolves around a local Hyderabadi thug whose brain is coveted by an international thug who has a brain tumour. This thug is named Big Bull (Sanjay Dutt) and he lives opposite Big Ben in London. Since he doesn’t like the clock reminding him that his time is running out, he demands that Big Ben is destroyed. This made me wonder if someone who clearly doesn’t have a brain can get a brain tumour, but we’ll let that be.

Shankar has a USB port in his head (from the previous film) and Big Bull’s plan is to transfer his memories into Shankar’s brain so he can live forever. To accomplish this, Big Bull relies heavily on Bentley (Bani J), so named so Puri can make jokes about the men in the film wanting to “ride” her. The heroine, Jannat (Kavya Thapar), isn’t compared to vehicles; she’s compared to food items such as palkova so the men in the film can talk about how to “consume” her.

When Ali entered the plot as Boka, a tribal from the Amazon jungle whose only activities are hunting and sex, my brain went into overdrive. Was this like the breakdance at the Olympics where the point apparently was to score a big fat zero? Was this some kind of clever social commentary on how the ‘wokes’ have taken over Netflix? Was this counter culture? Was Puri’s larger intention to get this film on OTT so people worldover can be shocked by the level of insensitivity on display?

But, I’m a film critic who has watched Puri’s Liger (2022), so I shook myself free of these delusions. There’s no irony here. Puri, for instance, isn’t critiquing objectification by including roughly 10,000 exaggerated close-up shots of Kavya Thapar’s thighs. That’s all he’s got.

I suppose if you watched the film as soft porn, you can appreciate how detailed the plot is for a film of the genre. Between close-ups of various parts of women’s bodies, double entendre dialogues, and Boka’s ‘stick’ that he waves between his crotch, there’s a vague story about the CBI on the hunt for a dangerous criminal. There’s also some ridiculous plot thread about south Indians wanting a separate country because they don’t want to be with north Indians any more, but this idea gets far less attention than the Bentley-palkova-Boka jokes. All we see are a bunch of people who hold up placards that say ‘Dravidian blood’ and get shot. Deep.

Sayaji Shinde reprises his role of officer Chandrakanth from the first film and wastes his talent all over again. Sanjay Dutt, who played Adheera in KGF 2, sleepwalks through the film as Big Bull, mouthing inane dialogues like, “We like the Chinese because we like fried rice.” The dubbing is awful, to say the least.

Sanjay Dutt isn’t the only KGF connection though. There’s a melodramatic frame story with a Mother, a Promise, and her Death. Puri shows us the Mother dying so many times in so many flashbacks that I wondered if my brain was glitching along with Shankar’s. Ram Pothineni can dance and he’s marginally entertaining as he switches between Big Bull and Shankar, but the film doesn’t take any of this seriously. I mean, someone’s Swiss bank account password is ‘I love you Jannat’. I rest my case.

The climax of the film is shot with a giant Shivalingam in the backdrop and zombie-like white people in a trance. Shankar transforms into Lord Shiva. Why? What? How? Who knows! Puri seems inspired by Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal (2023) and his own Liger, going by the crude references and talk of lions and tigers. Someone should change the channel from National Geographic to something less provocative in Puri’s brain. Please, for the sake of the audience and our mental health. We cannot handle Triple iSmart Shankar. We really can’t.

Sowmya Rajendran writes on gender, culture and cinema. She has written over 25 books, including a nonfiction book on gender for adolescents. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for her novel Mayil Will Not Be Quiet in 2015.

Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.