On demand: "HIT: The First Case"

A modest commercial success when it opened just before lockdown and thereafter the foundation of a surprisingly enduring franchise, the Telugu indie HIT: The First Case is a police procedural with mental health awareness - nothing new for viewers of the primetime TV it's been modelled on, but a project that starts to seem vaguely novel when set against the Hindi mainstream's Singhamverse, with its eternally untroubled and bulletproofed leads. By contrast, HIT (it's short for Homicide Intervention Team, a localised variant of CSI or SVU) opens with brooding detective hero Vikram (Vishwak Sen) being warned by his squad's shrink that he'll likely be triggered into remembering the grislier details of his own traumas if he persists in investigating the disappearance of a female motorist along the backroads of Telangana; before cueing up the inevitable flashbacks, the co-writer/director bills himself in the credits as Dr. Sailesh Kolanu, as if to underline the film's credentials. (Wikipedia suggests the doctorship came in optometry from the University of New South Wales.)

There's a fair bit to have to get past: TV-movie production values, deeply generic scripting, an absence of immediately familiar faces. Its primary virtue is that, in an age of bloated big-screen entertainments, it's snappy and streamlined, Kolanu and editor Garry BH cutting on exactly the line that leads us to the next scene. The downside of this Dragnettian rigour - just the facts, ma'am - is that it never develops beyond the barebones and basic, allowing itself few of the residual pleasures of the police procedural: it's merely a hustle from A to B, and come the final half-hour, Kolanu has to crank his score to the max and empty out pocketfuls of loopy reveals to make these events seem more dramatic. A Hindi remake (itself overseen by Kolanu, with Rajkummar Rao and Sanya Malhotra in the leads) and two further cases in Telugu have since followed, so clearly someone beyond the good doctor saw something here - even if that was no more than a blueprint for future construction. In this iteration, HIT's two hours of dour followed by ten minutes of silliness, like a mass-market paperback you race through on a beach holiday and then forget you've ever read.

HIT: The First Case is streaming via Prime Video; the third film in the series, inevitably titled HIT: The Third Case, is now playing in selected cinemas, and is reviewed here.