In Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, ironically one of the greatest portraits of crime and venality in a town already full of vice, the adolescent anti-hero Pinkie, a cold-blooded aspiring gangster with a carefully concealed core of warped asexuality and personal demons, muses about his meticulously built exterior of ruthlessness, 'What would be the fun if people didn't squeal?'
Unfortunately, the creators of the new crime drama series Mirzapur, namely Karan Anshuman, Puneet Krishna and Gurmmeet Singh, take this as a literal cue for its ham-fisted storytelling approach. The result is a by-the-numbers gangster yarn that is reasonably slick, with some competently staged pieces and bits and has a sincere, earnestly committed cast but, much to its detriment, dials up the gore and sleaze up to 11 and makes everything luridly sensational.
That itself would not be a problem if only Mirzapur had been more artful and adroit, like something from Scorsese and Peckinpah, in balancing chaos with credibility, the onslaught of fury and bloodshed with more incisive, even emotionally resonant storytelling. Regrettably, the series skids off the rails spectacularly and disastrously; the theatrical, even formulaic tenor of the proceedings robs the show of much-needed realism and this becomes a series that is more unsavoury than uncompromising.
It features a formidable crime overlord known to all as Kaleen Bhaiya, played by a magnificently sinister Pankaj Tripathi, an actor who can now safely do enigmatic, calculating evil in his sleep and still stay worth rooting for. As his name suggests quite literally, he deals in carpets, something for which the town is best known, apart from its notorious legacy of crime, something which, inevitably, is also his doing. Tucked inside the carpets that his minions ship are, rather unimaginatively, home-made kattas and slabs of opium, which are all that represent illegitimacy rather than a bigger game afoot.
This warped-up Don Corleone beds his younger wife with amateurish efficiency and broods in his fortress and with good reason. His son Munna (Divyendu) is like a Sonny Corleone of the hinterland, only gone more rogue because the gun-wielding, bullying and profane-mouthed slacker is really up to no good and his beleaguered father has to answer for the same. When the said good-for-nothing son turns a baraat into bloodshed, it paves the way for the entry of two young, relatively unknowing rookie siblings into this dirty world and for them to turn the tables as the new brain and brawn of Kaleen Bhaiya's operations. The stage is set then for many a simmering conflict of wills and egos and we can expect that the city will be the bloody battleground for the same.
It sounds all marvellously heady, even deserving of the operatic and unsubtly dramatic treatment that it gets. The problem is that while Mirzapur sticks to this narrative with enough aplomb and keeps things energetic and entertaining for almost every episode, we have seen all of it before and there is nothing new that Anshuman and his co-creators bring to the table. There are lunkheaded brats, there are trusted henchmen, there is a budding Michael Corleone and there are scowling rivals and seedy politicians and even smart-minded cops to take care of. There is the requisite number of wives and sweethearts, who, regrettably, get nothing much of an opinion or even a voice in this babel of scheming and gun-toting men but that is something to which I will come to later.
It is all gangster formula served almost with an air of stifling conformity rather the irreverence that it needed to be truly entertaining on its own terms. And while it is fairly comfortable to see Mirzapur unfold breezily like one of Milan Luthria's happily conventional but slickly packaged masala capers, it is this inherent lack of personality that cuts away all the pulpy drama and renders it basically a story told in auto-pilot.
And then, as the body count increases to ludicrous levels and the gangland violence becomes even more gratuitous (in one scene, a victim's innards spill out through the bullet holes), the show stops being thrilling as it should be and instead becomes increasingly desperate to only shock and terrify the viewer. This not only blunts its edge but also makes everything ridiculously, even ludicrously low-market and easy to predict. Even the nastiest of gangster films use violence to propel the plot ahead; the seemingly endless gunfire and gore in Mirzapur is without the slightest hint of tension and it only limits the narrative possibilities because every intriguing character that comes along has to die. As I said, the show only wants us to squeal.
Don't get me wrong; for the pulpy, even Bollywood-like yarn that it turns out to be, Mirzapur is nevertheless credible and believable in significant parts and it is better crafted and edited than the many obscure potboilers that are streaming on other online content websites. It has some well-shot scenes of mayhem; the camera soars above a courtyard of a mansion where a gunfight breaks out at night and in another scene, a tracking shot sweeps smoothly along the breadth of a house inside which a bloodbath is in a progress. But frequently, the film mistakes the idea of darkness for a literally under-lit scene of debauchery or brutality and after a while, we wish, unexpectedly in a gangster drama, that the camera would turn away for a while from the sight of blood spurting after a razor is wielded or after a man is unnecessarily castrated.
Mirzapur is riddled with a script that is curiously low in stakes even as things get predictably bloody and noisy in the later episodes and, given that it has made exclusively for the small screen, it simply does not make for very intriguing or suspenseful binge-watching. The cliffhanger at the end of each chapter is too obvious rather than one that makes us gasp in excitement and surprise and the plot twist towards the end is written lazily as if as an after-thought on how to bring already muddled things to an end. There is curiously little room for subversive wit here as well; a sidekick, who keeps a goon nearly forever high with drugs and powder, is called Compounder and yet another goon, when having abducted a feisty girl, cracks an awful innuendo about squeezing the trigger that feels particularly distasteful. Most of the cast make the forcefully coarse lines work quite effectively, in particular Divyendu who barks out the vitriolic abuses better than others but even then, the profanity feels more of an overkill than cleverly worded in its own way.
In the middle of the narrative, Anshuman and his co-writers lend some space to grace notes that feel quite compelling because they feel like a respite from the unsubtle and banal tenor elsewhere. Particularly effective, of them all, is how Bablu Pandit, the younger of the brothers newly recruited in Kaleen Bhaiya's ranks, applies his cool-headed and businesslike logic to expanding the latter's business like a professional setup. It is his level-headed perspective that feels most welcome among the other thickheaded characters who are too busy discharging their firepower in random, inexplicable bursts or humping or huffing and puffing relentlessly. For a time, it even feels like an alternate narrative direction especially when, out of nowhere, some eunuchs are recruited to smuggle the opium hidden in their saree blouses which is subversive for a Hindi-language offering. Then again, did we not see something similar in Raees?
All the actors throw themselves gamely at the premise and while there are only a few performances that are actually effective and resonant - Vikrant Massey's empathetic and shrewd Bablu Pandit, Tripathi's silently seething Kaleen Bhaiya and Amit Sial as the devilishly sharp cop who promises to clean up the city - all of them have enough meaty moments to be individually effective. Ali Fazal's burly Guddu Pandit, the elder and more bullheaded brother, is solidly cast against type and huffs and puffs quite entertainingly while Kulbhushan Kharbanda sneaks in stealthily from time to time as a decadent and perverse patriarch who watches wildlife videos and tosses whatever wisdom he learns from them.
What about the ladies? Even the most alpha male of gangster films and series feature compelling women who play their own intriguing part in the overall game but here, nearly all of them are destined, criminally, to be cowed down by the men in charge. Rasika Duggal, as Kaleen Bhaiya's neglected younger wife, is given atrociously little to do, Shriya Pilgaokar's damsel Sweety is just there for the sugary smiles and Shweta Tripathi's Golu Gupta, introduced in a sassy, tongue-in-cheek style, blunders at the crucial moment.
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