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‘Bad Cop’ is a cops-and-robbers tale, which shuttles back and forth between Mumbai and unnamed dense forest tracts where bad people do bad things. At this point, I’m going to confess that having seen only six of the eight episodes which make up this series, now streaming on Hotstar, I can’t tell you if bad comes to worse.
But I guess that’s fine too, because this Aditya Datt-directed, Rensil D’Silva written show will open with two episodes to begin with, and then drop one a week, so you will have more time to suss that out. Meanwhile, I’m letting out no spoilers by telling you that each episode hovers between a brisk 24-28 minutes, and the pace is truly the best part of the series.
I haven’t seen the original German series of the same name, so I can’t tell you if it is a faithful copy, or has built in plot deviations. But the writers (on the adaptation) are clearly Bollywood fans, naming Gulshan Devaiah’s doppelganger twins Karan and Arjun: the former is a cop, the latter is a petty ‘chor’, having taken a fork in the road in their ‘bachpan’, very ‘Deewar’ style.
Basically, that sets the tone for the series, which is fully ‘filmi’, where your furious eye-rolls are not an exception but the rule. Literally, anything else I will say will spoil it for you, but do be aware that you may have seen the situations before, which may lead you to spot an upcoming twist. Or two. The rest of it is pretty basic; no time or space for any complexities.
Gangsters will cuss. Cop will also cuss. Guns will be pulled out. Chase will ensue. Bullets will be sprayed. And so on.
Still,‘Bad Cop’ gallops along, spending time between the bad guys and the good, and some nicely done patches, especially when Karan and his fellow cop-cum-senior colleague-cum-biwi (Harleen Sethi) are barking at each other, and trying to keep things together around their little daughter. Sethi, whom we last saw in the terrific ‘Kohrra’, is excellent here too.
Arjun’s good-looking accomplice (Aishwarya Sushmita) who helps him pull those fast ones doesn’t have that much to do: maybe the last two episodes will make up for it. Saurabh Sachdeva shows up as a hard-working cop, hard on the heels of a mysterious killer, cast for a change as a good guy. At least up until now.
And then there is Anurag Kashyap playing a powerful mobster called Kazbe, who lords over his ‘ganda-dhanda’ and his rag-tag gang, which includes an inept, muscled fellow who keeps flubbing his job. This is Kashyap as foul-mouthed-villain, an extension of his baddie in ‘Haddi’, except this time he is kitted out in colourful ‘bundi-lungi’ outfits. Can’t unsee a black-crimson combo, or a shit-or-git sequence. Oops, is that, finally, a spoiler?
Snappy dialogues and action sequences abound, and like I said, each episode wraps quickly. But I’m not exactly ecstatic at being left hanging at a crucial juncture, because this is where things should start heading towards the big reveal(s): who is the good cop, and who is the bad one? Or is everyone crooked? Is the whole thing a parody of cop-and-robber shows, or do they want us to take it, and them, seriously?
The end could be a banger, or a clanger. Watch, as they say, this space.
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Bad Cop movie cast: Gulshan Devaiah, Harleen Sethi, Anurag Kashyap, Saurabh Sachdeva, Bad Cop Aishwarya Sushmita
Bad Cop movie director: Aditya Datt
Bad Cop movie rating: Two and a half stars
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