Kajol’s The Trial, Shahid Kapoor’s Farzi, Priyanka Chopra’s Castle: The weakest web shows of 2023 had the biggest stars
Take, for example, the Hindi version of “The Good Wife”: “The Trial,” with Kajol in the lead, was not terrible because of the leading lady trying too hard to be believable; She didn’t get the balance between her star and the other actors right. Kajol is an actress enough to be able to pull off difficult scenes, but the series never gets a chance to be impactful, as it’s always worried about how to advance its lead.
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I had the same problem with ‘Farzi’, a film about clever counterfeiters and clever artists, produced and directed by the prolific duo Raj and DK. Top billing, rightly, went to Shahid Kapoor. Everything skewed in Kapoor’s favor because he was the biggest name in Bollywood.
The other actors, especially Vijay Sethupathi and the wonderful Kay Kay, are reduced to mere supporting acts the way they always have been in our mainstream films.
This insistence on keeping the star at center stage and seeping into a formula that needs to be more equitable and democratic in order to be effective destroys it. Why is this thing so difficult to understand?
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Take another example. The dire spy saga The Castle – not quite an ‘Indian’ series, with the Russo Bruce and Richard Madden headlining the headlines, but with Priyanka Chopra getting the all-important second billing, of course we’ll claim it as ours – did nothing (except that billing) for Chopra, nor Do anything for it. If there had been anyone else in her place, it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Chopra tried her best – stunning, body-hugging dresses, slick kicks and punches – but nothing worked.
Guns and robes
I was really looking forward to Raj and DK’s Guns and Gulaabs because, really, how bad can anything be with Rajmummar Rao? But this throwback to the ’90s with its cassette players, edgy pop songs and Sanjay Dutt-inspired sporting goofs felt like a cobbled-together collection of scenes and sequences from the lot we thought we’d left behind, and for good reason. I couldn’t figure out a single reason here to bring that era back, unless it was just, you know, let’s do the ’90s thing, with the bell-bottoms and the half-jackets and the songs.
The Independent
A good actor needs a good script. Mohit Raina, so good in Mumbai Diaries 1 and 2, couldn’t rise above The Freelancer’s red-hot plot involving terrorists, kidnappers, depressed wives, beautiful asylums and dangerous hotspots around the world: you could take exactly the same combination, and turn it into a suspense thriller, but… This Neeraj Pandey outing, which also stars Anupam Kher and Sushant Singh, was unsuccessful from the start.
