Khakee The Bengal Chapter review: Prosenjit, Saswata Chatterjee’s show flattened by banality

With the catchy title song going, ‘ek aur rang bhi dekhiye Bengal ka’, we are hopeful that this new Neeraj Pandey series, Khakee The Bengal Chapter, set in Calcutta/Kolkata, will actually be different. The eight-part show starts with a kidnapping gone wrong, and then the story begins unpacking its wares in right earnest: sloppy goons, sharp cops, a posse of politicians with murky underground connections, nefarious activities involving dead bodies and organ harvesting.

A promising start quickly descends into predictability. The beats are familiar, the character types are even more so. Apart from the fact that the faces are mostly Bengali actors — some familiar, some not so — Khakee The Bengal Chapter comes off as same old. And that’s too bad, because the ensemble comprises some of the most popular actors working in Bengali, starting with top stars Prosenjit Chatterjee, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, and Jeet, amongst others.

As in the Bihar chapter (2022), also created by Pandey, which was lifted by a clutch of stirring acts, especially from Avinash Tiwary, Ashtutosh Rana and Jatin Sarna, we are given a tussle between mobsters-with-history and good-and-bad-cops. Which is fine, because cops-and-robbers will never go out of vogue: all you need is a slap-up plot with enough edge. But that’s not what we get here: even the Bengali dialogue is leavened with enough Hindi and English for us to feel comfortable, the patina of newness kept carefully in check.

Some of the casting choices have been made keeping familiarity in mind. Saswata Chatterjee playing a menacing bad guy is not that new even for those who don’t follow Bengali cinema: remember him as the creepy Bob Biswas in the Vidya Balan starrer Kahaani? Parambrata Chattopadhyay made his Bollywood debut as a smart cop in Sujoy Ghosh’s 2012 delicious thriller: here he is again, playing a policeman. Chitrangada Singh, as an ambitious politician, reminds you of her lovely idealistic young woman in Sudhir Mishra’s 2003 ‘Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi’, in her crumpled cotton saris. And Prosenjit Chatterjee’s star turn as the powerful legacy studio owner in Vikramaditya Motwane’s 2023 ‘Jubilee’ is still top-of-mind-recall : here he plays a dodgy neta.

The action flashes back to the early 50s when Shankar Barua Bagha (Saswat Chatterjee) comes to the city as a boy with his mother, and carves his way to the top of the crime heap, displaying the kind of savagery required to run a hard gang. His faithful acolytes Sagar Talukdar and Ranjit Thakur (Ritwik Bhowmik and Aadil Zafar Khan) keep everything humming, keeping an eye on their own lower rungs, as well as the ‘netas’ who use their services. As crafty politician Barun Roy who uses every trick in the book to keep ahead of the game, Prosenjit has his moments. Sadly, Parambrata is confined to a guest appearance: more of him would have done this Bengal chapter good. Jeet, as upright cop Arjun Maitra whose mission is to clean up his city– ‘not the city of joy but bhoy ( fear)’– is effective too, but too many close-ups as reaction shots slow things down.

Every time there’s a combing operation, the goons mysteriously manage to get the upper hand. Ooh there’s a mole amongst us, says a cop, with deep surprise: it’s like no one’s heard of bad eggs in the police department before. The banal bits weigh heavily on some of the interesting twists, and you are left wondering where so much of the cultural specificity of Bengal, which should have really made this thing really sing, has vanished.

Does it have to do with the imperatives of streaming in India, to make everything palatable to everyone, even if that leads to flattened narratives? Whatever happened to taking creative risks, in order to create the excitement which a show like this needs? Examples are not far: Netflix’s own latest show, ‘Adolescence’, which has blown us all away, is set in a small British town, with its characters speaking in accents-and-cadences completely their own, without fearing if the audience will be alienated. Can we please have a show like that for Indian audiences? Or is that too tall an ask?

Khakee The Bengal Chapter cast: Prosenjit Chatterjee, Jeet, Ritwik Bhowmik, Chitrangada Singh, Saswata Chatterjee, Joy Sengupta, Aadil Zafar Khan, Mimoh Chakraborty, Aakansha Singh, Shruti Das, Parambrata Chattopadhyay