Given the old material they are stuck with, the main cast members fail to bring anything novel to the table. Their dialogue delivery is hollow, their swagger is forced and their confidence seemed strained Keshav Dass
Review: Indian Police Force (web series)
Platform: Amazon Prime
Rating: 5/10
Director: Rohit Shetty and Sushwanth Prakash
Indian Police Force immerses audiences in the turbulent world of the Delhi Police, as they deal with a string of bombs carried out by the Indian Mujahideen.
A series of blasts that spread fear throughout the Indian nation's capital is the compelling premise of the first episode of the seven-part web show.
The series boasts a star-studded cast that includes Sidharth Malhotra, Vivek Oberoi and Shilpa Shetty.
As the story progresses, Joint Commissioner Vikram Bakshi (Oberoi) and Superintendent Kabir Malik (Malhotra) call the shots in a unique cell unit tasked with solving the puzzles surrounding the planned pandemonium.
The unstoppable police officers make an awkward, if not completely clumsy, entry into the world of web series. They target the person known as India's most wanted terrorist, Zarar (Mayyank Tandon), a young man who appears to be as simple-minded as he is cunning. The resulting suspense that emerges lacks authentic heat and with its formulaic storytelling within this genre, it is trite.
Rohit and his co-writers Vidhi Ghodgaonkar, Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket had the opportunity to thoroughly develop the antagonist's past with the extended screentime that comes with a series as opposed to a theatrical release, but this was sadly overlooked.
Instead, we are given half-baked back stories with moms, spouses and children as well as turbulent pasts intended to stir our emotions, that fail to hit the mark in arousing a human aspect with the characters. The track's effect and aesthetic appear so unimpressive, as though it was directed by a less accomplished filmmaker than that of the Simmba, Singham and Sooryavanshi director Rohit Shetty.
Given the old material they are stuck with, the main cast members fail to bring anything novel to the table. Their dialogue delivery is hollow, their swagger is forced and their confidence seemed strained.
Malhotra strikes the ideal combination of physicality, pace, posture and the default economy of expression for any actor required to play a young police officer. He does excel in the choreography of some hand-to-hand combat scenes.
The only thing that can match the villain's pallid personality and the fact that he isn't a threatening, larger-than-life supervillain character, is his ability to blend in with the crowd.
Oberoi does not have enough screen time to create any impact, either good or bad. The same can be said for Shetty. The addition of a female cop was an exciting idea that didn’t amount to much. We still long to witness a full-blown female cop in the Rohit Shetty cop universe. Perhaps Deepika Padukone may provide this in Singham Again that’s set to release in August this year.
There's no discernible attempt in the series to provide a detailed portrait of the men and women who comprise the overburdened security system that fights day in and day out to maintain the safety of India's vast national capital city. It is never really in the running to be anything more than mediocre and rise above the ordinary because of the clunky and uninteresting way it plays out. Indian Police Force commits the grave mistake of aiming for banal thrills and surface-level gloss rather than intense realism.
While there are plenty of action scenes, shootouts and chases in the show, it lacks a lot of the thunder and high-pitched bluster that one generally associates with the Cop Universe created by Rohit.
More creative narrative decisions and plot twists would help the series go above and beyond the typical fare. The pacing stumbles in some scenes, which makes the suspense fluctuate. It periodically becomes tangled up in a maze of jerky visual effects and bad computer images along with shaky camera work in an attempt to pick up the momentum.
The Indian Police Force is only another dull, completely predictable game of cat and mouse that veers through police raids, bomb disposals, explosions, and flying vehicles. The series is, at best, an elaborate cut-and-paste job consisting of tropes mixed together from the director's popular big-screen police movies. The entire season gave off the appearance of a Ray-Ban Aviator commercial.
Keshav Dass is a radio presenter on Hindvani for the Chart Show (Sunday 12pm-3pm) and the Saturday Shake Up (Saturday 11pm-2pm).
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