Cast: Arbaaz Khan, Kay Kay Menon, Vikram Gokhale, Virendra Saxena

Director: Manish Gupta

Rating: 3/5
Stone Man (shall we dispense with its full name for this review?) is an entertaining film and recommended.

It IS a hatke movie, in that there is little music (though there is an item number) and the characters are not good and evil. In fact, right at the end, there is the faint suspicion that one of the good guys may actually have been very bad.

But it is fun to watch.

This is because the story of Stone Man is classic: a cop chasing a serial killer. Make that former cop because Kay Kay Menon is suspended, later fired, for killing a man in custody. The man he kills is a suspect in the murder of a boy whose head is bashed in with a rock. This is the first of many such killings.

Witnesses find kumkum on the rock, and Menon thinks the murders have a religious/spiritual motive.

This is where the greyness of the movie comes from: it is crime based on belief, rather than greed or evil.
Kay Kay's boss (Vikram Gokhale) allows him to conduct a parallel investigation on the killings despite his suspension.

Menon is first rate: export quality, like Boman and Irrfan. He is lean and carries himself like a man should. He is never awkward with his body and his expressions are very good, as is his dialogue.

Gokhale is fat and slobbish and makes little attempt to act.

Menon the hunter is in turn pursued by Arbaaz Khan, who takes over Menon's job at the thana and thinks Menon is actually the killer.

Though his role is not insubstantial, Arbaaz is flat and it is cruel to expose a man of such limited ability to Menon's radiance. Though he is not credited on the film's poster, Virendra Saxena also has a pretty meaty role that he's delivered well. You may remember Saxena as the thin, dark man who played Jassi's father in the serial.
The oomph in the movie comes, very slightly, from Menon's wife Rukhsar, whose yummy body is shown naked from the back in a very deliberate shot. Not fully, of course.
She is unconvincing as an actress and does not have the body and skin of a middle class housewife though that is not a bad thing.

She complains, perhaps improbably, that Menon's not been having enough "sharirik sambandh" with her. And this leads one to think of why there is no polite, commonly used word for sex in Indian languages.

The moments of tension in the movie are well handled and in fact quite scary. Your reviewer shut his eyes and hummed Vaishnav Jan and hoped the moment would pass quickly.

Some of the fight scenes are, and this is a problem in Bollywood, contrived. Enraged people who want to hurt someone do not stamp on stomachs; they wind up and put the boot in from the side.

But these are quibbles.

Writer-director Manish Gupta has done well.