Kennedy review: It’s Anurag Kashyap’s Taxi Driver until it isn’t anymore!

Like most Kashyap films, Kennedy battled its way to a release in India and while the film eventually loses its way, it highlights the irony of a system that would rather censor voices than trust people to form their own opinions!

The thing about complacency is that the longer we sit with it, the more we start tolerating what once disgusted us. First we’re shocked, then we adjust, and eventually we slip into denial chasing escapism instead of accountability. Rape reports, murders, bodies found, the numbers pile up so relentlessly that the response is often, “What’s new?” and that numbness is terrifying. Even with factual evidence, powerful sexual predators continue to walk free, and it all leaves you frustrated, but also helpless. You start wondering what’s the point of asking questions if all it does is make you a target? Maybe it’s easier to accept the rot and assume nothing will change. That’s probably why revenge stories feel so romantic today. Watching a man beaten down by life go on a revenge spree can feel cathartic. But most angry young men on screen are angry for effect, or they echo the system’s rage. Rarely are they truly angry at the system itself, maybe they’re afraid to be or too comfortable not to be. And that’s where Kennedy stands apart.

The story follows Uday Shetty, aka Kennedy (Rahul Bhat), an ex-cop who now exists in the grey space. Officially dead on paper, he works as a premium chauffeur in Mumbai, driving the rich and powerful around the city. Unofficially, he’s a hitman hired by his former police colleagues to “take care” of things that can’t be written into reports. Commissioner Rasheed Khan (Mohit Takalkar) keeps him on a leash with a transcational relationship as he promises information about Salim (Aamir Dalvi), the gangster Kennedy has a long-standing score to settle. But the moment Kennedy starts going slightly rogue, the system he works for begins to spiral, and so does he.

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The shadow of Taxi Driverlooms large. Like Travis Bickle, Kennedy is a silent observer moving through a diseased city. He listens, absorbs, and watches as the powerful speak in hushed tones inside luxury cars. But unlike Bickle, who is a lonely, disillusioned common man pushed to the edge by alienation, Kennedy is not outside the system. He is its byproduct, an ex-cop turned executioner, and a man who doesn’t just witness rot but participates in it. Both men are shaped by trauma, but Kennedy’s trauma is institutional as he chases a man who destroyed his life while he hunts in the dark with the same system that betrays him. As a chauffeur, he becomes privy to the quiet truths of capitalism and politics - how governments and industrialists collaborate, how crises are manufactured and managed behind tinted windows. 

Set in Mumbai during COVID-19, the city becomes more than a backdrop. Masks aren’t just mandatory; they’re a stylistic treatment for vigilante heroism. Corruption lingers like a smell you can’t wash off, the socio-political and financial crisis is governed by shadowy “bade sahabs,” and survival becomes the only moral code. Visually, the film leans fully into neo-noir. Sylvester Fonseca’s camera searches for beauty in decay as every frame feels composed, almost graphic-novel-like. 

And then there is this slight difference between the two. Travis is a fed-up man who believes in cleansing the city. Kennedy, however, is not delusional about morality; he knows he’s dirty. He is the villain turned protagonist as he doesn’t just kill because he has to he enjoys it. He murders a man in between a hand job, chokes another just to send a message and wipes out an MLA’s family with a detached efficiency, even as the unhinged son joins the chaos. There is a dark playfulness in these scenes, a reminder that Kashyap loves the lyricism of the brutality of violence as if orchestrating an opera of blood and murder. But Kennedy is not untouched by this unleashing of violence. Each person he kills returns as a ghostly presence, poetic reminders that violence leaves residue acting like fragments of a conscience pushing to surface. And in Charlie (Sunny Leone), a pawn trapped in this chessboard, Kennedy gets a reminder that innocence still exists, even if the world chews it up. 

Because this is an Anurag Kashyap film, it invites personal readings. It’s hard not to see Kennedy as a metaphor of a filmmaker who has battled censorship, funding issues, and institutional resistance. A man declared “dead” by the system still operating within it. Maybe this is Kashyap’s way of speaking when speaking directly becomes difficult. Maybe it’s his way of processing rage in a culture addicted to revenge narratives. In that sense, Kennedy feels perhaps his most silent personal work as it is meditative and controlled compared to his earlier loud operatic chaos. And Rahul Bhat embodies this restraint powerfully. His heavy, dragging voice feels like it carries the weight of every compromise, as his slow, burning from within performance feels like a possession.

But then comes the shift as somewhere along the way - the film that begins as a meditative neo-noir thriller starts surrendering to its own aesthetic. It begins to ache to be Taxi Driver or The Killer, films where silence exposes the fractures of reality with surgical sharpness. The difference is that in those films, the brooding inner monologues and quiet rage impactfully reveal something raw about the world. In Kennedy, as style starts overpowering substance, the open-ended conclusion and the film leaning heavily into film-festival sensibilities risks becoming indulgent rather than illuminating. Instead of jolting you awake from the fever dream of complacency, it sometimes sinks deeper into mood. And that is where the film both succeeds and falters. It dares to be angry at the system, not just perform anger. It dares to sit in rot without pretending to clean it. But just when it could cut the deepest, it gets distracted by its own shadow as Kashyap gets overplayed by Kashyap himself!

Kennedy is currently streaming on Zee5!