Dabba Cartel on Netflix, comes to us with no dearth of expectations. It is firstly produced by Excel Entertainment who once were kings of content and have lately been a little under the weather as far as quality is concerned. But I thought the formidable and vast cast would inspire this series to the finishing line.
Much as I appreciated the saga of sinister sisterhood and the gallery of feminine talent thrown together, the writing(by Vishnu Menon and Bhavna Kher) though clustered with intrigue, suffers from a seriously blotched third act.
Be warned, the series suffers a credibility deficiency from the start. To believe that a bunch of housewives could actually pull off a dabba scam selling drugs in the guise of matar-paneer (so to speak) is stretching it a bit too far. But then you have all these super-talented ladies bending the credibility quotient back towards normal level with their sheer screen presence.
They are all in fine form. But it is Shabana Azmi who towers over the proceedings . In an author-backed role she takes charge as only she can, rendering the plot holes (of which there are plenty) excusable, at least when she is around. Her confrontation scenes with the drug mafioso Chavan (Sandeep Chauhan, superb) are far more cogent than her awkwardly written scenes with her best friend (Lilette Dubey).
While the tempo of storytelling is brisk, it is not always even. Predictably the men who are either weak or compromised, come across as shadowy even when they are at the forefront. The most memorable male character is the meek investigator Ajit Pathak (Gajraj Rao) who doesn’t inherit the earth (as the Bible promised) but is disarming in his determined incorruptibility.
Rao shares some agreeable moments with Sai Tamhankar, who plays a hardnosed cop with a liking for women. The lesbian angle just doesn’t land in the plot. This is the umpteenth series where a female cop is shown to have same-sex impulses. Nothing wrong with that. But why are female cops chosen for this treatment?
The sprawling format begins to sag towards the mid-portion wherein the crime angle gets darker. There is limited scope for the original sisterhood, already straining at the seams, to grow into something beyond the business at hand. This is a pity. You don’t cast so many skilled women actors as tiffin carriers, fill their dabbas with mind-bending drugs, and then watch them sink deeper and deeper into the morass of corruption.
At the end no one is happy. Let alone redeemed in Dabba Cartel.
