'Can the world of customs and customs agents be... sexy?' asks Taskaree: The Smuggler's Web, a new seven-episode Netflix series from creator Neeraj Pandey.
The world of smuggling certainly is, as we've seen time and again on screen. But Taskaree shows us the other side of that coin by putting the airport agents tasked with tracking down and thwarting those smugglers at the forefront. Despite all its peppy, shiny packaging, Taskaree feels like staring at the conveyor belt of passing luggage at baggage claim.
It’s familiar, repetitive, goes on longer than it should, and forces you to see gaudier and brighter colours than you knew existed.
Superintendent Arjun Meena (Emraan Hashmi going through the motions) is the suspended customs agent who's summoned back to the job when a new, no-nonsense customs head, Prakash Kumar (a cardboard Anurag Sinha), is brought in.
Kumar wants to clean up a system of corrupt airport officials who help smugglers move crores of contraband through the airport every day. More specifically, he wants to bring down the notorious Chaudhary Syndicate headed by crime boss Bada Chaudhary (a sauceless Sharad Kelkar).
Lazy “TV Plus” Storytelling
Taskaree sets a new standard on Netflix for lazy “TV-plus” storytelling—the industry term for glossy, unambitious, basic storytelling aimed at converting network TV audiences to the wonders of streaming. I have no issue with this kind of simplistic sensibility and glossy aesthetic that offers little room for nuance or dimension, as long as it’s fun. That’s the unspoken transaction here. We’re willing to let go of all sense of logic, sophistication, and reality if what we get in exchange is thrilling and enjoyable.
But the half-baked, feet-dragging series opts for lazy narrative devices, two-dimensional characters, and a loud pitch, giving us very little in return. The series doesn’t even manage to reach the mantle of harmless, breezy, empty movie calories that no one will remember a year from now.
The wafer-thin treatment here includes a hand-holding voiceover narration through each episode, which refuses to leave anything to the imagination, along with some of the most unhinged, loud colour work that has perhaps ever graced an Indian streaming series on a major platform. Throw in a gas-lighty background score that seems to insist that something fun is happening even when it isn't.
I’m sorry, but no amount of peppy music can convince me that watching a sincere, committed airport official staring intently at a baggage scanner in search of anything illegal is fun for anyone.
Writers Neeraj Pandey and Vipul K Rawal want to use this world to create an arena for big twists, grand takedowns, fun face-offs, and dialogue-baazi. But I can’t think of a single winning sequence that delivers on these promises.
Despite spies, shootouts, murder, and kidnapping, the most (inadvertently) attention-grabbing moment is a scene where a domestic flight lands and all the passengers get up to scramble for their bags. That is, until a flight attendant asks them all to sit back down, and they…actually listen (?).
I’m not sure which sci-fi universe this series is set in, but that’s no world that I recognise.
More Of The Same
Even the smuggling itself is a rehash of been-there-done-that territory. We’ve seen these tricks before. Goods being hidden in the linings of bags and hollow luggage handles, gold sheets being hidden within laptops, luxury watches being hidden within clothing, and so on. The only fun bit of trafficking we get is when a man is caught at arrivals with five small exotic monkeys coming out of his jacket pockets. That bit of menacing marsupial moving is exactly the kind of playful criminality the series should have had more of.
What could have been an enjoyable Maamla Legal Hai-style workplace dramedy of ‘crazy shit that gets snuck into airports’ gets punctured by irritating characters and an unexciting plot.
Taskaree tries to mount a twisty game of chess between two sides—the Chaudhary Syndicate and Arjun Meena’s “crack” team—who are constantly trying to outmanoeuvre each other. But neither gang has characters interesting enough to justify a tiring seven-episode season.
Each group even has an undercover mole on either side, and it’s somehow still dull. Among Arjun’s fellow officers is Ravinder Gujjar, played by Jubilee’s Nandish Singh Sandhu, who manages to make imandaari look even more boring than we’re used to. Though I did enjoy the third member of the trio—a solid Amruta Khanvilkar as agent Mitali Kamath, who’s the “muscle” of the group and even gets her own action sequences.
Inexplicably wasted and reduced to a supporting character, as one of Bada Chaudhary’s men, is the always excellent Jameel Khan, who could have made a meal of any of these lead roles in his sleep.
Structurally too, Taskaree is odd. The core plot only seems to get into gear halfway through the second episode, which is when Arjun Meena and his team are hired back and briefed about the Chaudhary Syndicate.
And just when the series seems to be settling into the comfortable rhythms of ‘generic airport customs takedowns’, the third episode halts all momentum and takes us into the uninteresting backstory of Priya (Zoya Afroz), one of Arjun’s undercover operatives.
The fourth episode is the one time the narrative comes close to flirting with tension, when Arjun and his crew set out to stop a massive incoming shipment of illegal goods across multiple flights.
Creator Neeraj Pandey, who’s made a small army of shows and franchises across Netflix and JioHotstar (Special Ops, Khakee) as one of the streaming era’s most prolific showrunners, knows how to keep things breezy and watchable. Even at his least exciting, the one place you can always find some ambition in his worlds is in the lively, dynamic way he shoots scenes. Characters or the camera, are constantly in motion (so many walking shots). The feeling of constant movement infuses a sense of urgency.
But it feels hollow when the material is this patchy and fails to match up. Even the show’s casting is uneven and seems to be all too comfortable with mediocrity.
Above all, you know Neeraj Pandey’s heart isn’t in this one because of the frightening lack of moustaches. In his worlds, passion is greater than or equal to the density and frequency of moustaches. But the ultimate failure of Taskaree is that it does nothing to challenge the fact that it’s far more enjoyable to watch smugglers be successful and get away with it than it is to watch them getting caught. If anything, the wasted opportunity of this show only reinforces that.
Taskaree releases 14 January on Netflix.
(Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He's also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)