Any action movie fans with a Netflix subscription who have not given the platform’s collection of Bollywood movies a try do not know what they are missing. Indian cinema is home to some of the genre’s most thrilling, but criminally overlooked in the U.S., releases, such as the Hindi-language 2025 movie, Deva.
I recently gave this reimagining of director Rosshan Andrrews’ own 2013 drama, Mumbai Police, a try without knowing what to expect. It ended up calling to mind an unlikely combination of films that I adore: the John Wick franchise and one of the best movies of the 2000s, Memento. If you consider yourself a fan of either, then I would say Deva is perfect for you, but there are even more reasons to check out one of the best action movies you likely have not seen.
Deva's Title Hero Is A Total Badass
Shahid Kapoor – star of Amazon Prime’s Farzi, a TV show fans of The Gentlemen would like – leads the cast of Deva as Dev Ambre, a detective whose intelligence is only outweighed by his rebelliousness. He is a cop who plays loose with the rules like he’s the Dirty Harry of Mumbai, but if the hero of one of Clint Eastwood’s best movies also had killer dance moves, which he demonstrates in a surprisingly engaging musical sequence early on in the film.
However, when it comes to taking on crime, I would more readily compare his tactics to those of Keanu Reeves’ stoic assassin from the John Wick movies – the best action movie franchise of all time, if you ask me. The fight choreography is beautiful – even more “balletic” than the new John Wick spin-off, Ballerina – but also brutal enough to establish Dev as a person few would dare to mess with. Even when his recklessness begins to cross a line, his charisma wins you over, but he really began to earn my sympathies when he suffered his accident.
Dev's Amnesia Thickens The Plot
Deva opens with Dev getting into a motorcycle accident and later waking up with no memory of who he is. To make matters worse, just a moment before the incident, he told his superior, Farhan Khan (Pravessh Rana, who, I must mention, looks exactly Narcos star Wagner Moura), that he solved the murder of their friend and colleague, Rohan D'Silva (Pavail Gulati), which he now must reinvestigate while keeping his amnesia a secret.
The story is also told in a non-linear structure, jumping back and forth between the life of Dev’s pre-amnesiac self, labeled “Dev A” (hence the title), and his new self, called “Dev B,” which reminded me quite a bit of 2000’s Memento. Now, I am not going to try and convince you that Deva is a revolutionary, thought-provoking masterpiece like that acclaimed Christopher Nolan film is, but it is a fun mystery with a protagonist whose memory complicates a deeply personal mission.
Deva Ends With A Mind-Blowing Twist
Also like Memento, the ending of Deva boasts a pretty shocking plot twist. In fact, I genuinely never once saw the final reveal of who killed Rohan coming.
Now, to be fair, it is not the most unique twist I have ever seen, but the story did an impressive job at preventing me from even remotely suspecting the final outcome as a possibility up until the moment it shows its hand, which I could not help but applaud the film for. However, you are just going to have to stream Deva on Netflix to find out what happens yourself.
You know, coincidentally, the first Indian film I ever watched was 2005’s Ghajini, which is a revenge movie about a man with short-term memory loss that is loosely inspired by Memento. What are the odds that my first return to Bollywood would be similar?
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