Khakee: The Bengal Chapter Review: Not As Unique As It Claims

 Khakee: The Bengal Chapter Review: Not As Unique As It Claims

Khakee: The Bengal Chapter Review: It is led by a quartet of Bengali movie stars who give it their all.

No matter where in the world the action takes place, the building blocks, barring a little bit here or a little bit there, hover in the realms of the familiar and the predictable when police officers go after criminals in conjunction with the powerful. Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is no different, but the setting and the nature of the tropes have an impact on how the thriller series looks and feels.

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.

Khakee: The Bengal Chapter has a lot going for it, whether it's well-mounted, well-lit, well-focused, or well-acted. 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 only scratches the surface of the political and criminal landscape, settling for predictable twists and standard characters such as a never-say-die police officer, a sophisticated political wheeler-dealer, a ruthless mafia don, and two hitmen surrounded by a variety of cops, goons, and power brokers working in opposition. No matter how tangled things get, there is little in the show that catches us by surprise.

The precursor, which was adapted from the memoir of a Bihar police officer, used some dramatic license to piece together actual events. Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is a fictional story that takes place in recognizable locations and draws parallels to actual events. An IPS officer wages war on crime in turn-of-the-millennium Kolkata and burns in fingers in the process.

 The underbelly of a sprawling city, where law enforcement officers are caught in a climate of distrust, gives way to the mixed urban-rural setting of Khakee: The Bihar Chapter. 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.

Parambrata Chatterjee makes a special appearance as the fourth Bengali star, playing an upright police officer who follows the law rather than Arjun Maitra, who is sent by the government to start a city cleanup. 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.

A strand of the story is Nibedita's ferocious and concerted fight against her political opponents. This fight adds an intimate personal drama to a male-dominated plot in which the female characters are marginalized. The lawman-protagonist of Khakee: 

The Bihar Chapter had to grapple with issues of an emotional nature even as professional pressures mounted on him.  The cops and criminals in The Bengal Chapter also have their fair share of domestic problems, but not to the extent that they 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.  A young police officer on Arjun Maitra's team is Aratrika Bhowmick (Aakanksha Singh), whose voice in the soundtrack helps to piece together the story.