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Bad Cop is not unwatchable. For older viewers, there may even be some comfort in the familiar, notes Deepa Gahlot.
Bollywood has already put its stamp on this formula -- twin brothers, one grows up to be a cop, the other a criminal. Still, the new Web series Bad Cop needed to be imported from the German Kriminell Gut (2017).
Adapted by Rensil D'Silva, directed by Aditya Datt, the series almost has a neon déjà vu sign flashing over it. In the process of Indianising it, the team of writers has picked every cop-gangster cliche seen in mainstream Hindi films.
Even Hussain Dalal's pungent dialogue, with profanity considerably toned down, does not help lift this humourless show. The intention of naming the twins Karan and Arjun must have been cheeky but it just comes across as unimaginative!
The show goes into frequent flashbacks to explain how they got separated in the orphanage, and took different paths.
Karan (Gulshan Devaiah) is a cop, so resentful of his wife Devika's (Harleen Sethi) promotion to become his boss, that the marriage is on the rocks, despite that annoying kid who keeps popping up and interrupting dramatic scenes.
Arjun and his partner Kiki (Aishwarya Sushmita) are petty crooks, and get into trouble when they witness a murder, and he leaves DNA behind (by now, everybody who watches crime thrillers knows they must not touch a dying stab victim!), making him the prime suspect.
The dead man (Deepraj Rana) was an investigative journalist, who was about to expose a major criminal nexus.
Arif Khan (Saurabh Sachdeva), is a CBI officer, who grabs the case because the journalist was his friend.
Where there are so many heroes, there has to be a villain.
Kazbe (Anurag Kashyap) is the typical Bollywood don, who rules the jail he is in -- he dances, waves a gun, has a girl in his bed, and chops mutton while barking commands at his minions, adding a touch of comedy which is otherwise missing in the script.
The hapless recipient of his rage is usually his bumbling nephew Raghav (Deepak Kamboj) whose spirit is strong, but gun arm weak.
During a shootout, one of the twins is killed, the survivor takes on the identity of the other, and as it always happens in films, nobody can tell the difference!
There must be some difference in their speech and body language, but why go into that, when there are enough complications to deal with, the biggest being a consignment of contraband that goes everywhere but to its intended recipient. (Kazbe dresses slummy, but uses the word 'consignment', not the colloquial 'maal'.)
Meanwhile Arif, with his reptilian gaze, haunts the scene, looking for the killer of his friend, even resorting to illegal bugs, and bullying sleep-deprived techies working on his team.
The action sequences and chases are slick, the pace is whizz fast, and the runtime of the episodes (six sent for review out of eight) kept to around 30 minutes. So Bad Cop is not unwatchable. For older viewers, there may even be some comfort in the familiar.
Gulshan Devaiah and Anurag Kashyap give good performances, without looking like they have seen or done this a dozen times before, even though Devaiah does not get to really enjoy the double role and work out variations between two characters.
There is an unexpected twist in Episode 6, as a reward for viewers who do not give up on the show.
Bad Cop streams on Disney+ Hotstar.
