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‘Mirzapur 2’ Review: An Impressive Cast, And Riveting Twists And Turns, Keep You Hooked

The Ali Fazal-Shweta Tripathi Sharma-Pankaj Tripathi starrer tries to do justice to too many characters and subplots but it’s hard to take your eyes off it.

One of the biggest strengths of the Mirzapur universe is its awareness of its own limitations. The makers know what they’re delving into is hardly clutter-breaking, and will never find acceptance among what’s usually labelled as ‘high art’. So creators Puneet & Vineet Krishna, and directors Gurmmeet Singh & Mihir Desai, go all out celebrating B-movie shticks, even updating them keeping in mind today’s times. It’s futile to begrudge such a show for its wafer-thin characters who go around mouthing dialogues like they were extras from a Prakash Jha or Anurag Kashyap film. As the first season made it clear, the Mirzapur creators don’t care too much about the show’s derivative origins, as long as they borrow the best from everything to come up with a nearly original cocktail of their own. If you liked Season 1, there’s every chance you’ll find the second season equally thrilling—which isn’t to say they’ve made the same show all over again.

Mirzapur 2 begins just a few days where Season 1 ends. Guddu Pandit (Ali Fazal), Golu Gupta (Shweta Tripathi Sharma) and Dimpy (Harshita Gaur) are in hiding, after barely surviving Munna Tripathi’s (Divyendu Sharma) version of the “Red Wedding”. Losing Bablu (Vikrant Massey) and Sweety (Shriya Pilgaonkar) has made both Guddu and Golu thirsty for vengeance. Using a last-minute manoeuvre, Kaleen Bhaiya (Pankaj Tripathi) has prevented Mirzapur from slipping through his fingers. Battling paranoia of Guddu coming back to exact revenge, Munna is constantly trying to prove his yogyata (worth) towards the throne of his father’s criminal empire, based out of Mirzapur. A mysterious chess piece called Sharad Shukla (Anjum Sharma), Munna’s first cousin, also enters the game with his eyes firmly set on Mirzapur. Beena (Rasika Dugal) is clearly still traumatised after being raped by her father-in-law (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) in the Season 1 finale. If these many characters and plot-lines weren’t enough, the makers add actors such as Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Priyanshu Painyuli and Vijay Varma into the mix.

Establishing the starting points for all the narrative threads in the first episode, Season 2 actually takes flight in the second episode. After being in hiding for a few months, Guddu, Dimpy and Golu visit their respective homes. A show like Mirzapur revels in the slightest dissonance. So, as they’re sitting across their parents, a burly Guddu mumbles to his father—“more than your sadness for Bablu’s death, I think you’re sad that I’m the one who survived”. The father (Rajesh Tailang) sits there with his jaw dropped, unable to process what his son just said, especially while he’s dealing with his other son’s death. It’s a classic masala moment where the father realises that, despite his best intentions, he’s lost both his sons forever. Guddu and Golu share a tender moment when the ultra-macho Guddu asks “Do you think mourning will make us weak?” Neither of them has an answer, so they bawl in each other’s arms.

Mirzapur’s roots in the pulpy, B-movie of the ’80s and ’90s are undeniably strong, and the show shines the brightest when it’s being a tongue-in-cheek homage to that era and the pulpy erotica novels found across India’s railway stations. Like how it produces Vijay Varma in a double role, as brothers—Bade and Chhote Tyagi—belonging to a crime family in Bihar. The show also sees Lilliput Faruqui as Dadda Tyagi, the stunted patriarch of the Tyagi crime family, a case of inspired casting. Also, Painyuli’s character as Robin—a Lucknow-based Saul Goodman-like character, who looks after the investments and runs errands for the local criminals of Purvanchal. He’s rip-roaring fun, especially given how Painyuli plays him with a stickiness. It would have been fun to see him remain a guy with unknown origins till the next season.

It’s when the show tries to veer away from the mafia politics to say something of its own that it begins to wobble. A CEO-type, trying to bid for land in rural Bihar, is ‘dealt with’ by a mob of the land-owners to depict ‘natural justice’. Both Guddu and Golu are shown trying to deal with their grief while keeping other relationships and their physical temptations at bay, which is a track that lacks conviction and clarity. In a pop culture where grieving indefinitely is romanticised while ‘moving on’ is seen as a sin, this could have been better handled. There’s also a scene that flippantly invokes sexual harassment allegations to settle personal and political scores. There are also a couple of scenes that toe the line between inventive and gratuitous violence, with a torch stuck between gutka-stained teeth, and jugulars being slit open with scissors.

However, it also feels unfair to expect a show like this to be astutely political on its own, considering its inherently filmy nature. Mirzapur 2 mirrors aspects of the early Game of Thrones seasons, the Godfather movies, the Ram Gopal Varma-brand of Mumbai noir, with Anurag Kashyap’s Wasseypur films the cherry on top of this hinterland noir sundae. There are at least three versions of Vito, Michael and Sonny Corleone in each of the crime families. At one point, Kulbhushan Kharbanda’s character, Bauji, cites the example of a political marriage alliance by mentioning Hrithik Roshan & Aishwarya Rai Bachchan-starrer Jodhaa Akbar. Curiously, it’s also a film where Kharbanda plays the role of the Maharaja of Mewar, Jodhaa’s father, almost making it seem like the showrunners are winking at us.

Screenshot from trailer.
Screenshot from trailer.

Like its first season, even the second season depends heavily on its principal cast and supporting players. Ali Fazal, as Guddu, is even better than he was in the first season. Tasked with a leading man’s responsibilities (duties he shared with Massey in the first season), Fazal does a good job of playing a man governed by rage and haunted by karma. Shweta Tripathi Sharma shows a remarkable transformation between the first episode, where she can barely shoot a gun with her eyes open, to a straight-talking, gun-toting Don by herself. She keeps Guddu in check by constantly reminding him of their end goal. Divyendu Sharma, as Munna, continues the good work he did in the first season. Some scenes featuring Munna seem designed specifically to appease the show’s meme demographic—a significant reason behind the success of Season 1. Rasika Dugal is a strong presence through the season, given how she turns around her circumstances by acing the ingenue routine. Isha Talwar, as a proxy Sonia Gandhi-figure in the show, is passable. She might go on to play a more significant part in the show’s third season. Mirzapur has an embarrassment of riches in its supporting cast—like Asif Khan’s Babar and his uncle Maqbool (Shaji Chaudhary), who train their guns on each other, in the middle of a biryani meal. It’s a stylishly mounted scene. Rajesh Tailang and Amit Sial’s characters go around doggedly gathering evidence against the crime lords. Dibyendu Bhattacharya is trusted with zingers like “Tension mat lijiye, pichhle 15 minute mein 4 baar so chuki hai aap. Chutiya banana hota, toh kab ka gaadi rokke bhaag liye hote”.

Mirzapur 2 is an ambitious undertaking, with a run-time of approximately 600 minutes (10 hours), which tries to do justice to too many characters and subplots. It attempts to magically contrive connections between different plotlines in a bid to weave them together by the season finale. Which means the season also sees a few hiccups in the middle episodes. Some subplots feel force-fitted, the VFX in a few scenes could have been better. But, like its source material, Mirzapur 2 also draws us in with its A-grade cast, and keeps us hooked through its many twists and turns. Like any bestselling thriller, even Mirzapur 2 is what many book critics may call ‘unputdownable’. It doesn’t preach, and doesn’t have anything particularly novel to say. But as the show goes on, it’s impossible to take your eyes off it.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.