'Indian Police Force' Review: More Fluff & Bravado Than Substance

Once a protagonist is clearly established in a Rohit Shetty film, especially one in his Cop Universe, he stops being a man and becomes a superhero. He will break, smash, and punch his way through one action set piece after another, emerging victorious at the end because he is ‘good’ and he is fighting the ‘evil’. And in the fight between good and evil, good always wins. This formula does work considerably well for his films but you need a lot more to sustain a show.

Rohit Shetty’s foray into streaming (with co-director Sushwanth Prakash), Indian Police Force feels like a movie that is stretched out to become a show. It feels like a show that expects to be watched in one sitting. Some shows are made to be binged and that’s fair in this content space but Indian Police Force expects it – maybe that’s why the cliffhangers are not juicy enough and are actually just hints about what is coming next.

The show opens with a series of blasts happening in Delhi (the fire looks almost annoyingly artificial) and the threat of many more looming in the horizon. At the helm of the investigation is DSP Kabir Malik (Sidharth Malhotra), the Muslim cop with a heart of gold stereotype who is pit against radicalised youth. This show, however, is less black-and-white than what we expect from these stories; there’s some attempt to rise above its premise. Kabir keeps reminding the audience that there is a difference between religion and religious extremism – an important conversation but one that isn’t nuanced or complex enough. There is a singular binary going around in circles.

Hansal Mehta’s Faraaz comes to mind. It asked readers to think and question; made you truly think about the difference between identity and ideology.

In IPF, the ‘bad’ Muslim stereotype is Zarar (Mayyank Taandon in his debut) – we get some backstory into his childhood and he also gets a whole romance angle but his performance feels too one-tone for you to genuinely be invested in it. But he isn’t the only one with a backstory. The show reminds us frequently that it isn’t just about its cops but also their families.

Kabir lost his wife (Isha Talwar) to a terminal illness and his boss Vikram Bakshi (Vivek Oberoi) seamlessly juggles between his work and his family. His wife is played by Shweta Tiwari who dishes out one of the show’s best performances. As a woman torn between pride and loss, her performance is a standout.

Dead and mourning wives aside, the show has one major female character – Shilpa Shetty Kundra as Gujarat ATS Chief. Her entry sequence was honestly too fun to fault and this show is further proof that Shilpa Shetty deserves an action vehicle of her own.

Perhaps because the characters feel too wafer thin or because the dubbing just feels off, most of the performances feel like acts. The investment in a story like this never comes because it rarely feels immersive. Sidharth Malhotra, who has played a man in uniform before, gets the gait and look right but the charm that the actor brings to his other roles is missing.

Some scenes, owing to the oversaturated colours for one, feel so artificial that the characters look like they’ve been placed there like in a Lego set.

The camerawork, however, by Girish Kant and Raza Hussain Mehta is tough to look away from. I love a good drone shot and this show gives you drone shots in oodles. It makes the show look much larger in scale than it otherwise would have and the editing that otherwise feels too fast perfectly compliments the action they shoot. The show also relies on several long takes – my favourite (in a rather dark sense) being one in episode 3.

In that sense, Indian Police Force is at its best when there’s action on screen – loud, fast-paced, and inventive. Both Malhotra and Shetty bring a fluidity of motion to their fight sequences that mixed with the rugged palette works very well for the show. But the stakes never rise beyond a certain point – this is the Rohit Shetty universe. The cops are always right and whatever they do, they do for the right. Police brutality is excused under the garb of bravado – any nuance that could’ve been afforded to the cops is missing.

This isn’t a Delhi Crime or even a Dahaad where cops get complex storylines that include their bravado and their faults. Instead, we get a scene where a ‘covert operation’ leads to a chase sequence that ends with the cops crashing through the Indo-Bangladesh border, victorious.

Indian Police Force is streaming on Amazon Prime.