An overly rushed, decidedly mediocre thriller
In the main plot premises bad copStreaming on Disney+Hotstar and produced by Fremantle India, they’re as trite as they come. Two identical twins end up on opposite sides of the law. One becomes a police inspector, the other a small-time conman.
bad cop Another Bollywood potboiler spread over an eight-episode web series. It may be titled with necessary permission from the rights holders Karan Arjuna 2. Yes, the man in uniform is named Karan, the rogue Arjuna.
When the orphaned siblings’ paths cross again, the inevitable happens. Big trouble ensues and the line separating thief from police is breached. One fateful night, during a police raid on a Mumbai ferry terminal, brothers who had grown up in an orphanage vowing to live and die together are both injured.
After the shootings, Chor, a witness to a murder in a hotel in Pune, finds himself in a soup. He is the prime suspect. As he struggles to evade a special investigator assigned to track down the culprit, the robber is caught in a web of lies, deceit and divided loyalties.
Adapted by Rencil D’Silva, screenwriter of the German RTL television show Criminal Gut, the Aditya Dutt-directed crime drama series — which dropped two episodes, to be followed by one episode a week — is dazzlingly frenetic and depressingly misguided.
bad cop It’s an overly rushed, unrelentingly mediocre thriller that gets stuck in a tangle of its own making. It jumps from one thing to another and is unable to see the wood for the trees. (This review is only for six of the show’s eight episodes, so one doesn’t know if the show will get better or worse as it heads toward its climax).
Gulshan Devaiah is the lead actor in a dual role. He never misses a trick and gets completely into the swing of things. But the pressure to work through and around a story too feverish and frenetic for its own good affects parts of his performance.
To save himself, one of the two characters Devaiah plays, the law-breaking Arjuna, pretends to be someone he is not. In the process, he has to deal daily with policewoman Devika (Harleen Shetty, good as Kohra), wife and brother’s boss who is on the side of the law.
Devika is estranged from her husband but she continues to share a house with him for their daughter (Kaya Ingle). Arjun, on his part, has a cute partner in crime, Kiki (Aishwarya Sushmita), who pops up now and then and snaps at his feet.
Kiki wants Arjun to abandon his mission and run away safely with her. But the man is stuck as he is determined to find out why detective Arif Khan (Saurav Sachdeva) thinks he had a hand in the murder of a journalist.
The elaborate subterfuge-and-false-hope-building is meant to be an edge-of-the-seat, cat-and-mouse game with danger lurking at every turn, but it never develops into anything that could be considered engaging.
Anurag Kashyap stars as Kajbe, a gangster who runs his underworld enterprise from within a prison without any hindrance from the law. A hot-headed, foul-mouthed bad guy straight out of a Hindi movie.
Mafioso chases everyone within earshot. Her favorite punching bag is her nephew and henchman Raghav (Deepak Kamboj), the only son of her sister (Grusha Kapoor in a cameo).
Pushing Raghav spoils an important task. This creates a chain of events that mess up the affairs of Arjuna, Devika and Arif. When things run out and a valuable shipment goes missing, Kazuv has a trump card up his sleeve
Kazbey’s, of course, is only one of many quests that form the plot of Bad Cop. Arjun is on his own mission of concealment and discovery and so is Arif Khan. The former is determined to prove his innocence. The latter is bound to bring the murderer of his journalist-friend to justice.
Its first few episodes bad cop Elephant poaching and ivory poachers remain sporadically on the activity of a ring of poachers. The bandits send their acquired goods to Mumbai. Arjun has to find out who these people are and how they run their business once he steps into the minefield.
bad cop An action drama. There is no shortage of thrills and rushes. But due to the mechanical, formulaic method of mounting, the technical subtleties that appear are of the strictly superficial variety.
The series, only mildly engaging, is too rushed to be able to give the audience a realistic chance to fully grasp what’s going on. For a thriller, pacing is usually an admirable thing, but when it’s not properly restrained and allowed to be as unbridled as it is here, pacing can be counter-productive.
Despite a remarkable star turn from Gulshan Devaiah and a competent supporting performance from Harleen Shetty, due to its many intrigues and setbacks, bad cop It creaks much more than it crackles.
