What's with the spelling of this film's title? The earlier movies with this name – the one with Jeetendra and Mumtaz, and before that, the one with Vyjayanthimala and Balraj Sahni – spelt it as "Kathputli", which is closer to the pronunciation of the Hindi word, which means "puppet". So let me get into the spirit of detection, like supercop Akshay Kumar here, and try to crack the mystery. One, they didn't want the spelling of this film's title confusing the millions and millions of viewers who still remember the older ones. But then, that's the obvious solution, isn't it? And the answers to mysteries in the movies are rarely obvious. So here's my theory about this remake of Ram Kumar's Tamil film, Ratsasan. Akshay Kumar is after a serial killer who slashes his victims. Get it? He cuts them… hence, Cuttputlli.
Cuttputlli begins unpromisingly. Akshay Kumar is in his zone as Arjan, an aspiring filmmaker. He is looking for a producer who will back his filmmaking debut, but due to family circumstances, he becomes a cop. I wished this whole section had been written differently. Its relevance to the narrative is that Arjan wants to make a film about a serial killer and his research will help him track down this film’s serial killer — but we waste a lot of time, and the story wouldn’t have changed by much even if Arjan had been an obsessive serial-killer buff, cutting out and preserving newspaper articles. When you are remaking a movie, won't you try to fix the small glitches and improve it? Or maybe they did not think of it as a glitch, or at least a glitch as big as the random song with Akshay and Rakul Preet Singh and a hundred backup dancers. Or the "comedy" with an Alzheimer's patient. Don't they know this is a genre where the slightest flab is detrimental to the film’s well-being?
But slowly, as the chase for the serial killer begins, Cuttputlli becomes generically watchable. No nails are going to be bitten to shreds. But at least, the crimes involving schoolgirls are gruesome enough that we want the perpetrator caught. In other words, we root for Arjan and that's half the battle won. But how you wish they'd taken more care of the details. Not a single cop seems to know the meaning of the word "psychopath" until Akshay reveals it to them as a "scientific term". In the Tamil film, the protagonist's family was convincingly real. Here, they look like they've stepped out of a glossy advertisement. And the part around the killer's MO feels rushed. Still, if you turn a blind eye to the coincidences (say, the plot point around an autorickshaw) and the obvious red herrings (a suspected killer), the bulk of the latter half works. That's not bad for an Akshay Kumar film these days.