‘Khakee: The Bengal Chapter’ Netflix Series Review - Significantly Better than the Bihar Chapter

You can't blame me for having low expectations from Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, given Neeraj Pandey's streak of dud releases. His name has stopped inspiring confidence in the audience, and anyway, this Khakee serves as a standalone sequel to Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, which was terribly dull from the beginning to the end. But filmmakers sometimes stun you with surprises. Anubhav Sinha left you dumbfounded with the very effective Thappad. Who expected such a solid piece of "message movie" from the man who directed Tum Bin 2, Cash, and Dus? Similarly, compared to Pandey's recent work, The Bengal Chapter looks like a win. I didn't expect the series to be this fascinating. Am I giving Pandey too much credit? Is The Bengal Chapter better only due to the filmmaker's collaboration with Debatma Mandal, Tushar Kanti Ray, and Samrat Chakraborty? Pandey, Mandal, and Chakraborty are writers, and Mandal and Kanti Ray have directed the series. On the technical scale, The Bengal Chapter is as clumsy as most Hindi Netflix offerings. A car crash during the first episode's opening scene is edited badly. When a character hits his head against the rods of the jail, you are able to tell that he is faking it. The action sequences are serviceable, even though the punches look rehearsed, and there is no violent force in the kicks. Someone throws bombs at the police, and the explosion that occurs clearly looks like the work of CGI.

Still, one of the significant improvements in The Bengal Chapter is the casting. The Bihar Chapter was infected with vanilla performances. Here, everybody fits into their roles effortlessly. As IPS Arjun Maitra, Jeet shows what made Karan Tacker's Amit weak. There is a scene in The Bengal Chapter where Arjun removes his glasses and makes eye contact with a woman, which prompts her to get out of his way immediately. One can almost hear him whispering through his eyes, "Don't you dare come in front of me and my duty." His powerful glare is piercing - it reveals a person who has seen many incidents like these. Amit came across as a schoolboy trying to act all tough and intrepid. Arjun convinces you that his bones are made of steel. Tacker's limited expressions looked amateurish. Jeet uses his limited expressions to present himself as a cop who's unflinching. Even the villains are fine. In The Bihar Chapter, Avinash Tiwary was miscast as a bad guy. Here, Saswata Chatterjee initially sticks out as a bad choice. As he kills his enemies one by one with a long knife, we feel as if the show is trying too hard to sell him as a devil. With a clean shave, Chatterjee looks like a cute little baby playing with a knife. You don't take his actions seriously. However, once we see him with a mustache, we accept that he is the same man who hacked all those bodies. Prosenjit Chatterjee, on the other hand, behaves like a sly snake who can bite anybody at any moment. His Barun Roy doesn't hesitate before slapping the Chief Minister, who, in Subhasish Mukherjee's hands, looks like a scared little marionette. Barun is the evil puppet master who likes pulling strings from behind. His superpower is that he can control almost everybody, and his new target turns out to be Sagor Talukdar (Ritwik Bhowmik).

When things become ugly, Barun offers Sagor a ticket to the realm of politics (his political career is foreshadowed in the scene where he mispronounces the party's name while rehearsing his speech). Barun's plans could have been executed smoothly without Ranjit (Aadil Zafar Khan). He is Sagor's brother from another mother, and he is almost always angry. The anger gives this character a layer of unpredictability, while Zafar Khan exudes a demonic vibe through his dirty looks that sometimes burn a hole in the screen. When Ranjit's eyes dangerously scan Sagor, his wife, and a girl who's like a sister to him, we begin to feel uneasy. We are not sure who Ranjit will pick, and this uncertainty can make you fidgety. But why does Ranjit behave like this? What prompts him to see Sagor as a target, as an enemy? Blame Arjun's manipulative tactics. He creates a rift between Sagor and Ranjit. This is where The Bengal Chapter becomes interesting. A thoroughly generic show might have put Arjun on a pedestal for removing criminals and crime from the city. The Bengal Chapter, however, doesn't paint itself with the strokes of black and white. By destroying Sagor and Ranjit's relationship, Arjun also ends up harming innocent people in their personal orbit. Someone is sexually assaulted; someone dies. I wish The Bengal Chapter had allowed Arjun to introspect on his "crime." Doesn't he feel even a little guilty? The writers, alas, don't go into a highly complex territory. At the end of the day, they want The Bengal Chapter to be conventional and crowd-pleasing. It's a pity that they don't take much risk because whenever they try to be different from other cookie-cutter Netflix productions, the show sings. I liked how The Bengal Chapter keeps us at a distance from the people on the screen by employing a simple trick: The good guys do bad things, and the bad guys display the capability to do the right thing. When Sagor notices a torn bag, he offers money. Sagor and Ranjit are criminals but can also love each other and their friends openly. Even Bagha (Saswata Chatterjee) adores his son terribly, even if he's not as sturdy as Bagha might have wanted him to be.

The framing device of The Bengal Chapter is a bit clumsy. If you carefully think about it, the character needn't dispense the entire backstory. Her decision reeks of exposition - the makers fail to merge it with the narrative fluidly. Pooja Chopra and Chitrangada Singh aren't given much to do in the series. The latter's character is depicted as a fierce foe of the ruling party, but she mostly supplies generic lectures during political rallies. Shraddha Das gets two or three scenes, while Aakanksha Singh gets to do some decent ass-kicking. The female characters, overall, aren't well-defined or manage to leave an impression on our minds. The Bengal Chapter also consists of Pandey's awkward sense of humor, which I first noticed in Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha during that scene where a henchman running towards Krishna slips. In Sikandar Ka Muqaddar, we saw a "The End... Oops!" text near the film's finish line. This weird tradition continues in The Bengal Chapter through that scene where a guy, as thin as a stick, tells Bagha that he could protect him from hostile enemies. If Arjun Maitra isn't too busy, could he perhaps investigate the reason behind Pandey's newfound penchant for cracking jokes that aren't funny?

Final Score- [5.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times