When you decide on a title like Blank, you must make sure that your film is exactly the opposite. Otherwise you unwittingly end up providing ammunition for critics and viewers. You remember Paul Verhoeven’s deliciously awful film about Las Vegas strippers called Showgirls.  New Yorker critic Anthony Lane had written in his review that the title is “not so much a noun as an imperative”.  Here too Blank isn’t merely an adjective, it’s an entire sensibility. Which, as you can imagine, makes for a pretty dull movie.

Despite the vendetta twist in the end, Blank eventually doesn’t rise above being a stilted “bad Muslim” narrative. It’s yet another film that plays on Islamophobia and it does say a lot that it comes with the backing of the BJP candidate from Gurdaspur (who plays the clean-handed ATS chief) and the Canadian journalist specialising in doing non-political interviews (who does a special end credits song, titled Ali ali).

A loud, overstretched thriller starring Sunny Deol in rescue mode…