Applause Entertainment’s The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination did it much better recently. The political thriller is a tricky genre, workable when on firm ground (ref: the Rajiv Gandhi series), ineffective when serenading slippery slopes.
Not being a major fan of Season 1 (which I found dry, staccato, and self-important), I didn’t exactly jump into Season 2 with joy. Admittedly, Season 2 is a marginal improvement on its predecessor (Special Op 1.5, if you please). At least this time we are able to keep watching, if for no reason then for the breakneck pace at which things move: it is always fun to see the flamboyant fall.
Celerity per se is no virtue, specially when it comes to laying out a coherent blueprint for an exacerbated spy thriller where the action moves from one exotic location to another. For starters, try an AI scientist (Arif Zakaria, bursting at the seams with righteous indignation) who is kidnapped in Budapest by “unknown elements” (you will get a lot of that in this series), while in Delhi a RAW agent is chased down a mall where he is shopping with his wife, for his antim sanskar (this is what happens when you buy stuff at a clearance sale).
The way in which Neeraj Pandey shoots the two crimes simultaneously is indicative of the series’ hunger for claps. Special Ops 2 is all about keeping the audience hooked. The theory that raciness is quite possibly a reliable replacement for rationale is not entirely expendable: even Prithviraj and Mohanlal tried it in L2-Empuraan.
I had asked one of the technicians from Prithviraj’s film about sections that I found incoherent, and he replied, “Oh, that is Prithviraj indulging himself in some re-creation of what he saw and liked in some European film.”
I got the same feeling quite frequently when watching Special Ops 2. Chunks of the overcooked action seem interpolated and played out with clocked certainty. Ramanand Sagar’s espionage thriller Aankhen had intermittent song breaks. This one has frequent action breaks. Some of them work. Most of them seem to be there just for wack of it.
Where the series seems completely at a loss is in sniffing into the characters’ personal lives. Himmat Singh (KK Menon, looking throughout as if there is a sour smell in the room)’s wife (Gautami Kapoor) remains a shadowy figure, pining to have more to do. But you see, the men with their guns and hidden agendas get all the attention in a series where a cyber attack must be stopped.
Everyone is busy trying to save the world. But who saves us from a series that has clearly bitten more than it can chew? Sadly, the performances too seem hurried and cursory. Tahir Raj Bhasin as the archvillain is more like a geeky techie than a menacing villain. Well in tune with a series that has more bark than bite.
