If Mirzapur was a raging inferno, and Mirzapur 2’s deadly radiance wavered but remained constant, Mirzapur 3 is composed of banked embers that occasionally erupted into flames.
The show is at pains to emphasise that the stakes are higher and that the battle field now encompasses all of “Pradesh,” with “Pashchim” demanding more than “Purvanchal” is willing to give. However, the Who Will Be The New Bahubali game is becoming stale in front of our eyes, and season 3 is less “bhaukaal” and more boring.
It isn’t exactly as if it’s been steadily downhill from the first season (2018) which introduced us to a fictional Mirzapur, coasting on the trappings of the real one with its characteristic combo of carpets and kattas, and its self-confessed ‘king’, Akhandanand Tripathi aka Kaleen Bhaiyya, (Tripathi) and his bigda-hua-beta Munna (Divyenndu) who has notions about himself but no matching skill-sets.
Other mafia leaders have vested interests in the lucrative drug and gun trade, together with unanticipated irritants like local boy Guddu Pandit (Fazal) and his stern lawyer father Ramakant (Tailang), pose a threat to their control. The whole affair was immensely hilarious, Pankaj Tripathi gave off a certain Purabiya menace in his Kaleen Bhaiyya, Divyenndu was suitably manic, and the goons and the good guys exchanged “golis” and “gaalis” with equal felicity and intensity.
We saw the power of the Tripathis under attack from all directions in Season 2 (2020). The enemies of Kaleen Bhaiyya are multiplying both inside his opulent home, where his much younger, sensually disgruntled wife Beena (Dugal) resides, and outside, where the increasing intelligence of Guddu and his devoted countryman Golu (Shweta Tripathi Sharma) highlights the jungle’s rule: “jiske haath mein bandook, power usike paas hai.” To prevent our attention from waning, new characters continually enter the fight, and everything is satisfyingly violent and bloody.
Those who have been following the events of “Mirzapur” will recall how the second season concludes in a protracted gunfight, leaving Guddu and Golu empty-handed, Munna’s lifeless eyes staring back at us, and Kaleen Bhaiyya’s severely injured body disappearing.
Season 3, written by Apurva Dhar Badgaiyann, Avinash Singh Tomar, Vijay Narayan Verma, and Avinash Singh, starts with a long prologue, which goes about reacquainting us with the dramatis personae, and where they are at now: fair enough, as it’s been a long gap since the previous one. But all too soon, familiarity of both character and locale sets in, and you go along the ten episodes, 45-50 minutes each, waiting for something terrible to happen.
The issue is evident for crime thrillers that rely on the bestiality-brutality-viciousness ratio. To maintain the momentum, how many shockers can you incorporate into the proceedings? Everything seems to have fallen into an all-too-comfortable groove in Season 3, and the only time it jolts us is when the next round of savagery is thrown in the middle of all that chai, talk, and squash.
I’m not about to spoil things for you by revealing that there are a couple of murders that we do not see coming but by now the novelty has definitely worn off, and the two characters who were the first two seasons are mostly absent: hence, despite Ali Fazal’s great performance as Guddu, there is little that rest can do other than wade through long repetitive tracks with plenty of declarative and flowery dialogues. I liked her as an actress but I never really believed Shweta Tripathi Sharma was a Bahubali; in this season Golu gets quite a lot of play: she is tough when she isn’t desperately trying to sound like a gangsta but then she says something like ‘ab hum challenger nahin contender hain’. You don’t say.
On anther note, Tailang is also talented actor, however his struggle between keeping up his morality and survival-in-prison becomes flat even with an unexpected killing; And you keep waiting for Rasika Dugal to get into her own completely yet, Beena Bhabhi remains stubbornly encumbered by a squalling baby without enough room to demonstrate her cleverness.
This time, the subtle political implications of the widespread criminality in this “Pradesh” do surface once or twice, but they are uninspiring. Priyanshu Painyuli’s hovering in the background in his printed shirts, Isha Talvar’s crafty chief minister Madhuri, harping on a “bhay-mukt pradesh” while keeping a pulse on the dirty money, and Sharad Shukla (Anjum Sharma), the “daavdear” of the Mirzapur “gaddi,” cozying up to the power centres in Lucknow, all come off as much less effective than they should have. A walk-on antagonist who sounds like he belongs in a movie mentions “mann ki baat,” but he doesn’t have the same effect as a passing reference to the throwaway legend “UP, Ummeedon Ka Pradesh,” which was glimpsed in season one.
In terms of conversation, there is a constant barrage of “offers” and “deals,” “control” and “naye samikaran,” and so forth. The villains’ constant “baithaks” don’t really contribute anything. We definitely need a Humdinger season 4 to bring us back on track. Throughout the toing and froing, I missed Kaleen Bhaiyya and his schemes, and I hoped Divyenndu would somehow come back to life.
