Varun Jadhav

Frustrating. It does promise on the gore and style that you get from the trailers, but there's nothing more to it. Great acting and technically a well shot movie, but it just baffles me that it doesn't make an iota of sense. Enjoyable first half if you are down for the ride, but the second half just drags on and on.

If you have a meaty story by an acclaimed author, an able director, a power-packed cast, one could be forgiven to think that this would make for a great series, but really, all that glitters is not gold. The series opens with some promise, as you enter the world of a brash, bratty Vicky Rai only to see him killed at the end of the episode. The premise was set nicely for a tantalizing whodunit, but what follows is a hodgepodge invoking a feeling of boredom and frustration. Instead of the episodes peeling like an onion to reveal the culprit, the story is structed in individual episodes dedicated to one or two characters which are dragged out unnecessarily thus making the 9-episode runtime laborious to watch. The only similarity the episodes have to the onion peeling, is that as you go further, you weep. The story was adapted from the Q&A fame (Slumdog Millionaire) Vikas Swarup’s novel Six Suspects. The titular six suspects are a petty thief, a corrupt bureaucrat, a scheming politician, a tribal on a quest, a Bollywood actress with a vengeance and a tourist. The show has all these elements, and they are cast well with Ashutosh Rana, Raghubir Yadav, Paoli Dam, Shashank Arora essaying some of these characters. The number of suspects though as per my understanding is much less than 6. This seems to be counter intuitive as the screen is bombarded with new characters every few minutes till the first few episodes. However, some of these characters are sadly forgotten after a few episodes, while the others are discarded only to be called back later for some scenes in the latter episodes. Some of these include heavy weights like Sharib Hashmi, Vineet Kumar and Amey Wagh, which really is a pity. Credit where credit is due, the acting and the cinematography is beautiful, however the narrative as mentioned previously, is meant to be structured but it just seems bizarre and disconnected till much further. If the writers, who include director Tigmanshu Dhulia, were making it seem like order in chaos, I have to say they faltered there. The moving parts are connected by the cop characters with shades of grey played by Pratik Gandhi, Richa Chadha and Guneet Singh who feature only from the third episode onward but still for some episodes thereon work only as the medium through which the audience view the backstories of other characters. The exposition goes on till episode 6 which covers much more than the great murder as the title suggests. The story meanders from there to political aspirations, more murders (before and after the one we should be concerned with), shady business deals, a kook, a kidnapping, a spiting deity and whatever Amey Wagh was up to. These elements could have been used to cook up a pulpy story, but they linger far more than warranted and by the end you don’t even care about the murder anymore. The last three episodes do pick up the pace, albeit it’s still more of a jog than a sprint, and the loose ends are tied up a bit shoddily. The show, for a murder mystery, is neither campy nor taut enough and should have been called The Great Indian Raita seeing as to how it spread all over and created a gigantic mess. What’s truly murdered is your time. Instead, watch Knives Out again.

There are war shows/biopics and then there's 1962: The War in the Hills. The show is a failure of epic proportions and is a trainwreck from the start to the finish. Yes, sitting through the first two episodes was excruciating enough, but I had high hopes from the likes of Mahesh Manjrekar, Abhay Deol, Mahie Gill and Sumeet Vyas which made me sit through the entire 10 episodes. However the cringe just kept piling on and on. There's very little "war" or strategizing or anything closely related to the fallout of it. We are instead thrown into needless love triangles, class divide, a bit of sexism and melodrama. Also, did I mention the shoddy VFX? The story is centred everywhere else other than the war. Everyone would love to have a glimpse of the personal life of a soldier, but the way it is handled in the show is just hammy. The only redeeming quality of the show is its album. But you don't need to watch the show for that. Save your time.

Outrageous. Judwaa 2 even after being a copy-paste remake of the '97 movie Judwaa, ends up being shallow. No one expected logic in a David Dhawan film, but this one takes it a bit too far. Some jokes do land but most of them don't work in 2017. Varun Dhawan carries the movie boldly with a committed performance which is what makes you sit through the farce. The rest of the cast is very very talented but their characters are completely forgettable. Where Mukesh Rishi's Tiger gave you the creeps in the original, the villain/s here are substandard. To worsen it further Salman Khan's cameo is totally ham-fisted.