When cops go after crooks in cahoots with the high and mighty, no matter in which part of the world the action unfolds, the building blocks, barring a piece here or a little chunk there, hover in the realms of the familiar and the predictable. It is no different in Khakee: The Bengal Chapter although the location and the nature of the tropes do impact look and feel of the thriller series.
Working within the narrative parameters laid down in Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, which premiered on Netflix in 2022, showrunner Neeraj Pandey tries to pull off (with varying degrees of success) a shift in style, sound and substance in the second outing.
Competently mounted, smartly lit and lensed, and solidly acted, Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is definitely not devoid of merit. It does what it sets out to – deliver a police drama that wends its way through the neighbourhoods and streets of Kolkata where, in the early noughties, politicians and underworld assassins make life difficult for an overstretched police force.
The seven-episode series skims the surface of the political and criminal landscape and settles for trite twists and stock characters – a never-say-die police officer, a suave political wheeler-dealer, a ruthless mafia don and two hitmen surrounded by sundry cops, goons and power brokers working at cross-purposes. No matter how tangled things get, there is little in the show that catches us by surprise.
The precursor, adapted from a Bihar police officer’s memoir, pieced together actual events with a degree of dramatic licence. While playing out on recognizable locations and drawing parallels with real events, Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is a fictional story. An IPS officer wages war on crime in turn-of-the-millennium Kolkata and burns in fingers in the process.
The mixed urban-rural setting of Khakee: The Bihar Chapter gives way here to the underbelly of a sprawling city where lawmen, caught in a climate of distrust, are hard-pressed to do their jobs. The relocation does not, however, lead to anything that could be deemed strikingly fresh.
Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, a Netflix series produced by Friday Storytellers, is in essence just another Mumbai underworld saga masquerading as a Kolkata thriller about people in power and the games that they play with their foot soldiers.
Be that as it may, if you do not look for depth in this exploration of the admixture of crime, politics and deadly violence, you might be reasonably entertained. The series plunges us into a politically volatile city overrun by kidnappers, murderers and smugglers of human organs and into the inner workings of a compromised police hierarchy.
The cast of Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is led by a quartet of Bengali movie stars who give it their all. The series presents a view of an underworld that stretches all the way from the top echelons of power to the dregs represented by a brutal don who runs his empire of crime with impunity.
Jeet, who has built his career around a long string of action films and is coming off Chengiz, a Neeraj Pandey-written period crime thriller, plays maverick IPS officer Arjun Maitra, who navigates a broken law enforcement system.
Prosenjit Chatterjee, a flagbearer of commercial Bengali cinema until he diversified into middle-of-the-road and non-mainstream films, dons the guise of a manipulative ruling party heavyweight Barun Roy, a man who wields enormous power.
The confrontations (often very gory) that erupt in the streets and bylanes of the city are not directly between Arjun and Barun but between the former and a dreaded don, Shankar Baruah alias Bagha, played by Saswata Chatterjee, and his lethal young lieutenants, Sagor Talukdar (Ritwik Bhowmik) and Ranjit Thakur (Aadil Zafar Khan).
The crime lord’s blood-soaked domain has no place for mercy. His ruthlessness is the benchmark that guides both Sagor and Ranjit. The two young men, inseparable friends, are temperamentally poles apart.
The quartet of Bengali stars is completed by Parambrata Chatterjee in a special appearance as an upright police officer who plays strictly by the book unlike Arjun Maitra, who is summoned by the government to launch a clean-up of the city. It smacks of an eyewash.
This is a man’s world that firebrand Opposition leader Nibedita Basak (Chitrangada Singh) tries very hard to gatecrash. She does occasionally get a fiery word in edgewise, but she does not come into her own until the run-up to the final act.
Nibedita’s bitter and concerted fight against her political opponents constitutes a strand of the story and adds an element of intimate personal drama to a male-centric plot in which the female characters languish on the fringes.
The lawman-protagonist of Khakee: The Bihar Chapter had to grapple with issues of an emotional nature even as professional pressures mounted on him. In The Bengal Chapter, too, the cops and criminals have their share of domestic issues, but not on a scale that could overshadow the larger drama.
One police officer’s wife is pregnant. Another’s worries over the dangers that he courts in the line of duty. Arjun Maitra’s team has a young policewoman Aratrika Bhowmick (Aakanksha Singh), whose voice on the soundtrack pieces the story together.
The context for the framing device is set in the opening sequence in which we see her with a colleague, Special Investigation Team (SIT) member Himel Majumdar (Mimoh Chakraborty), being involved in a road mishap.
Sagor, whose demeanour is constantly contrasted with that of the hot-headed Ranjit, has a family made up of his wife Manjula (Shruti Das) and her cat Chomchom. The woman and the feline play a key role in the drama of two friends whose paths diverge violently when ambition and envy come into play and threaten to tear them apart.
Although Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, directed by Debatma Mandal and Tushar Kanti Ray (one of the show’s cinematographers) and written by the former with Samrat Chakraborty and Neeraj Pandey, claims to present “ek aur rang….Bangal ka” – and perhaps does to a certain extent – its storytelling principles are not necessarily culture specific.
It is the principal actors (all of whom deliver the goods), the background score by Sanjoy Chowdhury, the title track composed by Jeet Gannguli (whose lyrics change from episode to episode) and the lingo (a freewheeling mix of Bengali, Hindi, English and street patois) that help the series strike roots in the milieu it plays out in. As for the story, it could be supplanted anywhere without its core being altered.
And that is the principal undoing of Khakee: The Bengal Chapter. As a tale of crime and punishment, it isn’t as unique as it would have us believe it is.
