Rohan Naahar

A computer whiz and a tech-challenged cop team up to solve a missing person case in Hotstar’s new crime-comedy series Pritam and Pedro, co-created by the illustrious Rajkumar Hirani. The series essentially serves as a launch vehicle for his son, Vir, who plays the mysterious Pritam. We meet the young man as he’s trying to report his grandfather’s missing tape recorder at a Goa police station run by Pedro, played by Arshad Warsi. The cops throw him in jail when he refuses to leave without registering his complaint. Instantly, Pritam stands out as an honourable young man, while Pedro comes across as a no-nonsense veteran who has seen it all. On paper, they make for the perfect odd-couple — the Indian film industries don’t make nearly enough buddy comedies. However, that’s about as interesting as things get, because, at the end of the day, this is a Hirani production.

We often underestimate the power that comes with having a backup plan. This is probably what people with standbys feel when they get cheated on. Or what folks with a lucrative job offer in their pocket think to themselves when they’re presented with peanuts during appraisal season. Having a backup plan affords you the agency you normally wouldn’t have in everyday life. But as immensely privileged a responsibility as reviewing movies may be, it often leaves you without a plan B. And where there is no plan B, there is no power. For two, sometimes three hours, you’re at the mercy of whatever is projected in front of you. No running, no hiding, no sneaking into the theatre next door to sacrifice precious brain cells to Cocktail 2 again. These are the thoughts that run through your mind when you watch something like Baby Do Die Do, the new movie starring the otherwise capable Huma Qureshi.

​Make no mistake, it is a minor miracle that Enola Holmes, the Netflix film franchise which had its first outing in 2020, hasn’t been corrupted by everything that has happened in the past half-decade. The franchise has survived two Trump administrations, a pandemic and whatever the Russo Brothers (filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo, known for directing four Marvel films) have done to the streaming industry (they reportedly tried to revolutionise the space with offerings like Citadel and The Electric State, but received limited success). And yet somehow, the Enola Holmes movies — revolving around the adventures of the newly-imagined sister of English literature’s legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes — are still as earnest as ever.

A sporadically clever but ultimately convoluted affair, Colony is somehow both underwritten and over-plotted. The Korean horror-thriller marks a long-awaited return to the zombie genre for director Yeon Sang-ho, who broke out internationally almost exactly a decade ago with the clutter-breaking horror hit Train to Busan. That film took a deceptively simple premise, injected it with some old-fashioned melodrama, and managed to appeal both to Western and Asian sensibilities. In the subsequent decade, Yeon has remained highly sought-after, having directed several movies and as many as three Netflix shows. With Colony, he returns to his roots, armed with a bigger budget, seemingly brighter ideas, and a significantly larger canvas to splatter with gore and other grimy fluids.

Laziness in mainstream Bollywood isn’t conditional; it’s constitutional. Cocktail 2 is a mocktail of a movie; sugary slop pretending to be the real deal. It’s populated by caricatures and not characters, set in locations that feel like postcards and not actual, lived-in places. Perhaps this is all by design; perhaps inauthenticity is the aspiration. But there has to be an element of truth even in the most far-fetched of falsehoods; there has to be something for those being duped, in this case, the audience, to latch on to. You could put Cocktail 2 under a microscope, or dip it in a chemical, and you still wouldn’t be able to decipher what truth it’s trying to get at. One thing is for sure, though, it is among the most misogynistic movies that mainstream Bollywood has made in a long time, which, for an industry that thrives on misogyny, is saying something.

You could bet your fast-falling rupees that the unit behind the film, Governor — produced by the same Vipul Amrutlal Shah who served up the deeply irresponsible The Kerala Story — had no idea that the universe would conspire to undermine whatever claims they’re trying to make here. The irony may be lost on the film’s team, of course, given a grasp of storytelling looser than the morals of mainstream Bollywood. Starring Manoj Bajpayee as an approximation of the former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor S Venkitaramanan, whose tenure overlapped with an economic crisis in the ‘90s that brought India to the brink of bankruptcy, the film is gratingly loud, ridiculously plotted and delivered with an amateurishness bordering on arrogance.

There was a time not too long ago when animated films provoked introspection. In recent years, however, the medium has pivoted to pacifying overstimulated children. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, for instance, is less a movie than a daycare to occupy kids’ time for 90 minutes. But hope has a tendency of revealing itself when you least expect it. Not many would’ve expected a new children’s movie on Netflix to offer more insight about the world than the recent films of Darren Aronofsky or Robert Zemeckis, but sometimes that’s how it goes — just look at KPop Demon Hunters. Now, the streamer’s latest offering, Swapped, takes the tropes of body-swap comedies of the past and filters them through a decidedly contemporary lens.