One of the most engrossing and famous genre of web-series is thrilling crime stories with intriguing investigations and unexpected twists in every episode asking you to immediately go for the next as binge-viewing. In fact fresh exciting events and sharp turns are must for a 10-12 episodes long series without any scope of unnecessary insertions, lengthy sub-plots and a painful stretched narration.
Unfortunately Hotstar’s first season of CRIMINAL JUSTICE fails to live up to the above mentioned requirements of a web-series and isn’t anything highly addictive or fresh in its subject matter, mixing three plots of a murder mystery, a courtroom drama and the insecure life inside the jail all together.
Officially based on BBC original 2008 show of the same title, its Indianised adaptation is done by Sridhar Raghavan and the episodes are directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia and Vishal Furia. To give you an idea, where the BBC original is a 5 episodes series of about 55 min each, the Hindi version is a 10 episodes series of about 50 min each, which clearly gives you the reason why it seems to be too long, stretched and uninteresting at times.
No doubt the basic premise of a cab driver getting caught in the case of rape and brutal murder and his family facing all the hardships living in the society makes an instance connect with the viewers in the first two episodes. But the narration takes too much time to set up this promising premise and then further loses the grip as soon as the directors get more interested in jail sequences instead of the courtroom drama, police and lawyers investigations.
It further becomes a tedious watch at times as many of those lengthy jail sequences are highly repetitive (reminding you of Sridhar Raghavan’s EK HASINA THI too) with nothing new as content being typically predictable. Don’t know why the director remained more interested in the jail and inmates fights so passionately? As a result, what could have been an edge-of-the-seat murder mystery, turns out to be just okay one time watch crime thriller also having a unexciting, lackluster climax.
Conceived by experienced filmmakers, the series is technically sound but also has too many dark sequences with low light and an uneven background score that manages to grab your attention only at intervals. It has a decently chosen lead cast but the actors do not get anything exceptional to do in a too lengthy screenplay with average dialogues (including abuses) wasted on the jail-inmates, who actually should have been given the least attention. The biggest sufferer of this remains Jackie Shroff who tries his best in a role that has cliché written all over it. On the other hand the supporting cast is strictly okay giving you nothing to write upon in details.
To be specific, though Vikrant Massey is superb in his portrayal of an innocent person and Mita Vashisht (as the selfish lawyer), Anupriya Goenka (as the young lawyer/assistant), Rucha Inamdar (as the sister) and Pankaj Saraswat (as the Senior Police Officer) perform really well in their given roles, the series actually gets saved by only one person and he is Pankaj Tripathi excelling in his comical act yet again.
In short, Pankaj Tripathi as Madhav Mishra is the only feature of this first season of CRIMINAL JUSTICE’s Hindi version that keeps you glued providing the entertainment, compelling you to complete the series, even when you lose the interest mid-way. So this can only be seen for Pankaj Tripathi alone more than anything else.
Rating : 2.5 / 5
