Priyanka Roy

If ’thirst trap’ had an eight-episode embodiment, it would be called The Royals. Netflix’s newest offering — a Mills & Boon paperback set in the visually rich world of Indian royalty — has its leading man Ishaan Khatter, dropping his shirt at the drop of a hat. From that first scene of the actor riding a horse on the beach with next to nothing on him, you know that Ishaan is here to satiate the female gaze. Which the actor — earnest, charismatic — manages to achieve to some extent. But I longed for a more brooding, almost Byronic hero. One so tortured by his past that he is unable to forge meaningful relationships in the present. Heathcliff-ian to some extent, perhaps, within as much as the gilded world of The Royals would allow. What we get instead in Ishaan’s Aviraaj Singh is a man child — a poor little rich prince who, when faced with a sticky situation, either shuts himself out or throws a fit or stomps off in anger. Sometimes he does all three together. Always to the viewer’s chagrin.

Dizzying inventiveness — both of the literal and metaphorical variety — is at the heart of Black White & Gray. Distinguished by a daring meta-narrative which turns the so-called tenets of the true-crime genre on its head, this six-part SonyLIV series is perhaps the most ingenious piece of writing seen on Indian screens in a while. Co-created by Pushkar Mahabal and Hemal Thakkar, with the former also doubling as director, Black White & Gray — with the title delving into the good, the evil and, more importantly, the in-between — focuses on the classic poor boy-rich girl trope, but builds a storytelling technique around it that keeps you on the edge of your seat. There are two intertwined strands: a mockumentary about a crime that is supposed to be real, and the restaging of the crime. Both are fictional, but what hits hard is that all of it could well be true.

There is a fundamental but very important difference in how we consume food and films. You go in for the same mutton biryani from the same outlet every time because you like how it tastes. If, one day, the taste differs, you will be sorely disappointed, perhaps even making a note to never order from the same restaurant again. How we react to the cinema we like, however, is just the opposite. If you like a film but are presented with almost the same film in its follow-up/sequel, you will reject it. You can look for the same flavour (and perhaps even some familiarity), but you will not appreciate a CtrlC+CtrlV exercise. Raid 2 suffers from this affliction. It is not only a retread into Raid territory, it also doesn’t serve its audience anything that we hadn’t watched in the first film. Seven years ago, director Rajkumar Gupta gave us Amay Patnaik, a sharp-thinking, quick-on-his-feet income tax officer. Honest to a fault and armed with dry humour, Patnaik’s run-in with powerful politician Tauji (a deliciously evil Saurabh Shukla) in what was billed as ’the longest income-tax raid in history’, made for some immensely watchable moments, besides delivering the kind of subtle social commentary that Gupta is known for.

While there have been scores of films made on the Indian Army and the country’s Air Force, it is quite baffling that Hindi mainstream cinema has hardly explored the exemplary bravery of the unsung heroes of the BSF. The Border Security Force, aptly known as ‘The First Line of Defence’, is the focus of Ground Zero, this Friday’s release in theatres, and a biopic of sorts of Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey. It was NND’s sharpness, his eye on the eye of the fish focus, and the passion and patriotism that a man in uniform has by default for his country, that resulted in the killing of Ghazi Baba, the chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed and the man responsible for scores of terrorist attacks, most significantly the Parliament carnage of 2001.

In terms of definition and DNA, the heist genre has had one formula down pat — style is greater than substance. The films in this world demand a willing suspension of disbelief in exchange for the promise of edge-of-the-seat thrills, high-octane action sequences, pretty people strutting around in eye-pleasing locations and, more often than not, a final twist that makes even the most ridiculous bits that precede it, worth it. Somewhat. Jewel Thief — The Heist Begins (it ends close to two hours later with the ‘warning’: The Heist Continues’, no spoiler this) ticks off all the tried-and-tired tropes of the genre to slapdash a heist film which evoked an unthinkable emotion within me — I missed the Race films (yes, yes, I am embarrassed). For whatever it is worth, the three films in the Race franchise — two of which starred Saif Ali Khan — oscillated, within its twist-a-second template, between lousy and ludicrous. Jewel Thief is, politely put, simply lame.

A mom allows her nine-year-old daughter her first-ever sleepover at the home of her new friend in school. When she lands up the next afternoon to pick her up, her world falls apart when she discovers that her daughter has vanished, with no trace of the family that supposedly lived there. That is the rather intriguing premise of The Stolen Girl, a pulpy, if often incongruous thriller, that relies a lot on convenience and contrivance, but is engaging while it lasts. Playing out on Jio Hotstar over five pacy episodes, The Stolen Girl is akin to a page turner, a trifle sensationalist if you may, tracing how the seemingly perfect lives of Elisa Blix (Denise Gough), a high-flying stewardess, and her lawyer husband Fred (Jim Sturgess) come to a standstill when their nine-year-old daughter Lucia is kidnapped. The police are pressed into action, even as red herrings — a ransom note, Fred’s brief affair, Elisa’s predilection to document every aspect of her life on social media — are strewn all through the narrative. It is good fun while it lasts, but The Stolen Girl — Eva Husson directs an adaptation by Catherine Moulton of the 2020 Alex Dahl-written novel Playdate — sacrifices its potential to become yet another series that doesn’t know what to do with its material after the initial episodes.

As is the case with most Akshay Kumar films in which he plays a real-life character — frankly, at this point, is there any other kind of Akshay Kumar film, apart from the odd comedy here and there? — Kesari: Chapter 2 cannot escape the trademark saviour complex that its leading man comes with. But unlike some of Kumar’s recent outings in this sub-genre of sorts, what acts as a ‘saviour’ here, however, is that despite a lot of theatrics on display, Kesari 2 is a largely well-made film. The second film in the Kesari franchise — which has no bearing on the first, a 2019 outing in which Akshay played Havildar Ishar Singh, the man at the forefront of the Battle of Saragarhi who almost single-handedly took on a regiment of the British — the focus lies on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and its aftermath. Kesari: Chapter 2 bills itself as ’the untold story’ of the genocide that perhaps remains the darkest chapter in India’s colonial history. The first few minutes of Kesari 2, directed by Karan Singh Tyagi and jointly produced by Karan Johar and Akshay Kumar, hit the viewer hard. Despite having watched the massacre that killed thousands of innocents in Amritsar on the Baisakhi day of 1919, dramatised several times on screens big and small, there is no escaping the horror that engulfs you as a viewer as the British troops, under the orders of General Reginald Dyer, fired indiscriminately at men, women and children until “the bullets ran out”. The official figure was put at 1,650, but the body count was several thousand more.

Losing a phone is an inconvenience for most, a nightmare for many. For Pratyush Dua, it becomes a question of life and death. Pratyush aka ‘Pratman’ is an influencer — the kind that have swarmed around us in the oft-repeated dime a dozen manner — whose life in the Internet bubble is solely based on getting to 10 million followers on Instagram faster than his immediate rival. For that, Pratman is willing to do all it takes, with everything about his persona, including his jarring ringtone screaming ‘Notice Me’. Until one day when his phone stops ringing. Stolen by someone who claims to be his biggest fan, Pratyush — played by Babil Khan in Logout, now streaming on Zee5 — not only faces the usual comes-with-the-territory misdemeanours of identity theft, digital arrest, data leak and so on, he also finds himself quickly losing control over a ‘world’ he thought he had complete power in.