Ashwni Dhir’s Hisaab Barabar, a Jio Studios film streaming on Zee5, is not the first – nor will it be the last – Hindi movie tom-toms the power and patience of the common man. Both attributes, it insists, are boundless. Its calculations go awry.
In a bid to lift itself out of a state of inertia – it fails in that endeavour – the film tests the endurance of the audience. The plot hinges on one of the oldest tropes known to moviemakers: an ordinary bloke takes on an oppressive system that is determined to badger him into submission.
The protagonist is an amiable Indian Railways employee. His adversary is a private bank out to exploit the ignorance and apathy of its customers. The story of their clash plays out along entirely predictable lines.
The bull-headed crusader faces many impediments as he wages a lone battle for justice. But since he is the hero of this story, he always finds a way around the hurdles in his path.
Radhe Mohan Sharma (R Madhavan), is a conscientious railway ticket examiner who, at the end of each working day, accounts for every single penny that he collects from errant passengers. The single father once aspired to be a chartered accountant. Circumstances conspired against him and he did not make it.
Radhe Mohan’s passion for numbers has lived on and has, as the film opens, ballooned into a full-blown obsession. He finds 27 rupees and 50 paise missing from his bank account. He demands an explanation from an apathetic official but receives none. Nobody takes him seriously, least of all Mickey Mehta (Neil Nitin Mukesh), the owner of the bank.
Radhe Mohan isn’t the only one Mehta has ripped off. He launches an all-out crusade against the bank. But getting the bank to own up to its wrongdoing is an uphill task. The face-off and its consequences take a heavy toll on the man.
Try as hard as it does, Hisaab Barabar does not quite add up. With a wobbly arc that, even when it wends its way out of its maze of numbers, does not settle into a rhythm, the film fritters away a promising premise on a bland David versus Goliath battle. The customer and the brazenly manipulative bank promoter stake their all as the cards are laid on the table.
Hisaab Barabar vacillates between the mildly droll and the stodgily solemn. Despite all its additions and subtractions, it never finds a mean number that can make all the well-meaning effort worth it. Admittedly, certain moments in the film, thanks to their intrinsic relatability, are passable but these are too few and far between.
Radhe Mohan means business but he does not possess the means to assert himself. He is driven by an unbreakable spirit and a faith in the system. The greedy Mickey Mehta is the exact opposite. He believes he is above the law thanks to his unholy nexus with smarmy politician Dabboo Dayal (Manu Rishi Chadha), who needs pots of money for an upcoming election.
No matter what is hurled at the protagonist by way of intimidation and humiliation – inevitably, there is a lot – he stands his ground. He is a glutton for punishment. The audience knows all along that Radhe Mohan will not have it easy but they also know that he will keep fighting no matter what.
So, irrespective of the misfortunes that befall him and the measures he takes to dispel them, the by-the-numbers Hisaab Barabar springs no surprises at all. Its message is crystal clear. The treatment is anything but steady and focused.
Radhe Mohan, on his part, does some spectacular number crunching – most of it feels like quick back-of-the-envelope calculations – on his way to stumbling upon a massive under-the-radar scam that targets middle-class investors who have no access to legal redress.
Radhe Mohan’s head for numbers gives him a head start over everybody else and makes him a formidable foe for the scammers. “Bank bhi toh insaan hai (a bank is also human),” says a manager. That insaan is only an imaginary personification of a machine geared to grind people into the ground.
Radhe Mohan’s accounting acumen helps him stumble upon a dark truth – the bank where he and 400,000 other customers deposit their hard-earned money swindles the unsuspecting account holders of negligible sums of money which cumulatively run into thousands of crores of rupees.
On his daily rounds on a train, Radhe Mohan meets a daily passenger (Kirti Kulhari), a woman with a significant connection with his past. The two become friends but their developing relationship turns adversarial when the lady reveals her true identity and intent.
The man has implicit trust in her and expects her to side with him when the world turns against him. She does nothing of that sort. But Radhe Mohan soldiers on. And the film meanders.
Madhavan lends weight to the relatable central character. His performance is, however, unable to offset the film’s flaws. Radhe Mohan does not evolve beyond his single defining trait. As a consequence, he is often upstaged, if only a touch, by Neil Nitin Mukesh’s flamboyant, avaricious banker.
Kirti Kulhari is saddled with a role that appears pretty substantial on paper and on the screen. But she, like everyone else in the film, is hobbled. The character does not develop into a rounded individual.
All that the leading lady does is respond and react to the moves the hero makes. Be that as it may, Kulhari does just enough not to be reduced to just another passenger in a film that lurches from point to point without gathering any momentum.
The numbers aren’t random in Hisaab Barabar. However, the way they are arranged and used prevents them from fully serving the logic of the tale and delivering the desired result. Humdrum execution is the film’s undoing. It bares its fangs off and on but its bite leaves no gashes.