A murder mystery going through the backstory of every character involved before reaching the conclusion is a very old format of the genre lacking the required excitement. The Great Indian Murder based on the novel, Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup, follows the same story progression and is quite a tough watch asking for multiple sittings to complete all its nine episodes.
(Spoiler Ahead)
However, its biggest drawback is that the series doesn’t even conclude with a revelation and leaves you in the middle. It strongly reminded me of the 80s when such murder mystery novels used to fail and rejected by the readers, which didn’t conclude and had ‘To Be Continued‘ written in the end, leaving it on its second part. Imagine reading 300 pages of a murder mystery reaching the end, revealing just nothing. In those days we used to read these novels at only 50 paise to 1 Rupee rent for a day and the bookshop owner had to listen to a lot of things for not making us aware of the incomplete content. After a couple of such failures, the authors also took notice and stopped splitting the murder mysteries into two parts.
To be straight, if after focusing on a few suspects of a suspense drama, a book or series says that the murderer is someone else, which will be revealed in its second part/season, then it’s like cheating the audience by making a big fool of them. That kind of story should at least conclude the mystery and introduce another in the end, to be continued in the second part. But here The Great Indian Murder forgets the important rule of storytelling and goes on and on (in rounds) with some unbearable stretching leading to nowhere. Moreover, it also has a weird insertion of a rich man (Raghubir Yadav) considering himself as Mahatma Gandhi stuck in a split personality mode.
The series also fails at the engagement level as soon as it moves from one suspect to the other, forgetting the earlier one. And then the execution tries to cover almost everything from family conflicts, childhood trauma, politics, ministers, police, casteism, nationalism, rich and the famous, the film stars, the poor, the underprivileged, the tribal, tribal god, and even Gandhian principles.
Overall, it’s an unexpected mess from the renowned writer-director Tigmanshu Dhulia and producer Ajay Devgn with a talented cast ensemble becoming a poor victim of uninteresting, directionless writing. Cannot say if the book is a much better read having the exact content. Personally, I could only continue because of Ashutosh Rana, Paoli Dam, Richa Chadha, and Guneet Singh, in particular with both Prateek Gandhi, Shareeb Hashmi and others failing to leave an impact. On the other hand, I still couldnt guess why on earth this was titled as The Great INDIAN Murder.
Rating : 2 / 5
Bobby Sing
bobbytalkscinema.com
