BOTTOM LINE
Rustic Mafia Story With Few Sparks
PLATFORM
Prime Video
RUNTIME
5 hours 20 minutes | 6 Episodes
What Is the Film About?
The Davan empire crumbles as Chhote’s power plays and Bada’s prison schemes trigger a family war. Imli’s manipulations and a viral sex scandal ruin their reputation, while Roli’s courtroom revelation destroys any chance of a reprieve. After a failed ambush in Moda Village, the conflict peaks at a bachelor party, when a rival gang launches a bloody siege, leaving the family shattered.
Performances
It’s the senior hands, Saurabh Shukla and Seema Biswas, who leave a strong impression with their deftness. They slip into the skin of a gangster patriarch and a street-smart homemaker so effortlessly, as if it were their second nature. Aakash Dahiya is effective while laying bare his conflict between his instincts and the larger good.
Ranvir Shourey, as the ignored son, desperate to make it big, gives a spirited performance. Quite a lot of talented actors, including Vineet Kumar, Sai Tamhankar, Govvind Namdev, Sheeba Chaddha, Tannishtha Chhatterjee and Sushant Singh, feature in the show’s lineup but are handed extremely stereotypical or one-dimensional roles that barely do justice to their mettle.
Analysis
If the makers of Bindiya Ke Bahubali were a startup and had to come up with a one-line elevator pitch to sell their story, it would be something like, ‘Godfather on steroids, but we go really rustic, add more sex, music and populate it with more oddball characters.’ Two big-time criminals with political ambitions and dysfunctional families clash, as their lust for power descends into an ugly mess.
The patriarch of the Davan family, Bada, is in jail, likely for a crime he didn’t commit. The time’s ripe for Chhote to fulfil his long-time desire to call the shots, but he’s in for a bumpy ride. He’s in an affair with an actress that his cop-brother ends up falling for. The youngest sibling is on the cusp of marriage with a US-based stripper. Bada’s brother, who generally means well, still cannot be trusted.
The women in the house are no less powerful in terms of their acumen, but are forced to be at the mercy of their men, yet it doesn’t stop them from chasing their physical urges. The Davan house is full of sinister secrets, but there’s some order to the chaos. In his desperation to score brownie points on the political front, Chhote lands a video that puts his rivals, the Bhamirs, in a tricky spot.
The story has all the makings of a serious, gritty political drama, but the director Raj Amit Sharma infuses it with a rustic touch: an uncanny blend of humour, romance, action and strategy. Raw emotions are on display, and the characters are unapologetic about their desires. Beneath their larger-than-life dreams, there’s time to notice their vulnerabilities and the core of their personalities.
The makers certainly display a grounded understanding of the rottenness of local politics in the hinterlands of North India and go all out to explore it, within the framework of a usual gangster story. There’s black money, extra-marital affairs, edgy courtroom battles, gory action pieces – packed in an eventful narrative. The individual threads work, but the show struggles to come together as a whole.
It’s quite evident that the web series is all about diving deep into a gangster family on the verge of ruin. The screenplay prepares you for a bloody siege and regularly throws hints of how this is destined to end. Once the basic setup is in place and the world-building is done away with, it fails to bring in anything new. The tension doesn’t grip you the way you expect it to, and the cliches take over.
Time and again, the skin-show and explicit scenes are squeezed (in the garb of raw treatment) into the series. The long-format indeed offers an opportunity to pack in many intimate details of the characters and the world in which it operates, but you want the show to go beyond the icing at some point. The absence of minimalism (unlike cinema) continues to hurt this storytelling style.
In comparison to the first part, Bindiya Ke Bahubali Season 2 has a more substantial plot that is on the move, yet you wish the creators opted for a slick, racier treatment and trusted the audience’s intelligence to get it. After all, it’s a world that most gangster drama enthusiasts are familiar with, and novelty isn’t its strength. It is quite watchable though, coming alive only in fits and starts.
Music and Other Departments?
Indian Ocean’s effort to lend a raw, folksy flavour to the songs and the score is visible, though the music gets stuffy and noisy after a point. It’s an experiment where they didn’t have anyone asking them to stop and give the show some space to breathe. The editing could have been sharper and less indulgent, too.
The cinematography is nothing spectacular but works; it does the job, playing a lot with the colours across costumes, props and backdrops, keeping the frames busy. While the makers elaborated on each of the characters and their eccentricities well, the absence of freshness in the premise hurts its cause beyond a point.
Highlights?
Quirky treatment of a regular story
Character establishment, few performances
Lively, busy narrative
Drawbacks?
Premise lacks freshness
Runtime too long for a done-to-death story
Resorts to cheap tactics to grab eyeballs
Did I Enjoy It?
In parts
Will You Recommend It?
If rustic, quirky gangster dramas are your thing, give it a try.
Bindiya Ke Bahubali Season 2 OTT Series Reviewed by M9 News
