Khakee: The Bengal Chapter - A Review: A Familiar Thriller in a Different Setting:

Thieves are often aided by people in power, making their capture a difficult task all over the world. This is the same in Khakee: The Bengal Chapter. Even though there are figurative and literal different pieces of the puzzle, the reality is most of them are rather similar and predictable. The area and edifice where the narratives take place do influence the ambience and atmosphere of the thriller series.

While the showrunner of Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, which came out on Netflix in 2022, Neeraj Pandey, is known for trying to change the style, and even the soundtrack of a show, it is typically impractical with the border in which it was set. His second iteration attempt proved to be more challenging regarding the concept’s sound and substance.

Furthermore, Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is highly accomplished for the quality of acting and how well shot and lit it is. However, it is not without flaws. True to form, Khakee: The Bengal Chapter set out to create a police drama that navigates through the many towns and streets of Kolkata where, during the early 2000s, politicians and gangster killers made life unbearable for an already strained police force.

The seven episode series scratches the surface of the political and criminal sphere and resorts to cliche turns and stock figures: a cop who is always on the ball, a sharp clever political businessman, a violent mafiosi father, his two lackeys, surrounded by a myriad of cops, thugs and politicians who work at cross purposes. However, no matter how far deep one goes, the show is pretty much lacking in anything that wows us.

The older part, based on a memoir from an officer in the Bihar police, combined real events with a certain amount on invention. Though it is fictitious, Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is based on an IPS officer's battle against crime set in and around Kolkata at the turn of the millennium. An IPS officer wages a war of unrestrained violence against crime and burns his fingers in the process.

The blend of rural and urban life in Khakee: The Bihar Chapter is replaced here by the dark underbelly of a large metropolitan where policemen, awash in a sea of hopelessness and distrust, find it extremely difficult to carry out their jobs. However, this shift fails to produce anything that can be termed as refreshingly new.

Under the direction of Friday Storytellers, the Netflix series Khakee: The Bengal Chapter is simply another Mumbai underworld tale doing satire as a Kolkata thriller of the power and the games played with pawns.

Nevertheless is how one can approach this theory, look deeper into the admixture of crime and politics and shocking violence, but not too deeply to lose entertainment value. This series takes us into a politically charged city teeming with kidnappers, murderers strutting around, and organ-humans smugglers who are a part of a finally structured inhuman police system.

The principal actors of Khakee: The Bengal Chapter take the screen along with a few Bengali movie stars who, put in extreme efforts. This series looks at the underbelly transitioning from the higher echelons of power to the lower depths, embodied by a heartless don, who criminally rules his empire without consequences.

Post Chengiz, the Neeraj Pandey written period crime thriller, action movie buff Jeet steps into the shoes of a maverick IPS officer Arjun Maitra, who is forced to work in a lawless society.

Before venturing into more artistic and niche films, Prosenjit Chatterjee monopolized the commercial Bengali cinema industry. He now plays Barun Roy, a political heavyweight who has control over a great deal of power. The role seems tailor suited for him.

The battles (usually very bloody) that break out in the city’s streets and alleyways are not fights between Arjun and Barun, but with a notorious gangster, portrayed by Saswata Chatterjee, named Shankar Baruah aka Bagha along with his vicious young commanders, Sagor Talukdar (Ritwik Bhowmik) and Ranjit Thakur (Aadil Zafar Khan).

There is no sympathy in a crime lord’s blood drenched territory. His mercilessness defines both Sagor and Ranjit. The two young men, bound by friendship, are extreme opposites in personality.

Also featuring alongside the ‘Bengal quartet’ of stars in a cameo role is Parambrata Chatterjee in the role of a straight laced police officer. Unlike Arjun Maitra, senior officers don’t usually take orders to attempt to clean the mess that plagues the city, which is by all means a cover up.

It is quite evident that Nibedita Basak (Chitrangada Singh), the firebrand Opposition leader is desperate to make an entrance in this world belonging solely to men. She does manage to get a fiery word in now and then, but she does not truly come into her own until the build up to the final act.

The political battles waged and lost by Nibedita enrich her portion of the story and gives the male dominated narrative some level of depth as far as female characters are concerned, who for the most part are casted in the sidelines.

In Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, the lawman-protagonist had to deal with emotionally charged matters while professional duties were piling up on him. So it is in The Bengal Chapter, with the cops and the criminals, as always, have some home problems, But not at a level that would exceed the main plot's drama.

The wife of one police officer is pregnant. Another is a wife who often frets about the risks her husband bakes. Arjun Maitra's team has a young police officer, a woman, Aratrika Bhowmick (Aakanksha Singh), who narrates the story.

The framing device’s context is introduced during the first scene where we find her along with a colleague, SIT officer Himel Majumdar (Mimoh Chakraborty), involved in a car accident.

Sagor, who appears perpetually at odds with the impulsive Ranjit, has a family which consists of his wife Manjula (Shruti Das) and her pet cat Chomchom. The lady and the cat are fundamental to the story of the two friends whose friendship is violently ruptured by ambition and jealousy.

The Khakee: The Bengal Chapter show is directed by Debatma Mandal and Tushar Kanti Ray, who is also the cinematographer of the show. The script is done by Debatma with Samrat Chakraborty and Neeraj Pandey. They claim to show “ek aur rang….Bangal ka” - and surely they do to some degree - but it is not the ethnocentric nature of the storytelling that defines its principles.

Everyone does their part superbly, aided by the lead actors, the background score by Sanjoy Chowdhury, the title song composed by Jeet Gannguli (who changes the lyrics every episode), as well as the lingo which is a free flowing blend of Bengali, Hindi, English and local slang. All that allows the show to have authentic roots in the setting it’s made in. The essence of the plot is so basic, it can be placed anywhere without changing its center.

This is what makes Khakee: The Bengal chapter most flawed. The uniqueness of the crime and punishment tale is far less than what it tries to project.