'Matsya Kaand' review: A revenge story that swings from ‘aha!’ to facepalm moments

TV anchor and actor Ravii Dubey is pretty fluid, and his many disguises as a conman work really well in 'Matsya Kaand'.

At one point when the smoke clears, you think it’s Shahid Kapoor in his Kabir Singh avatar. When he’s sleeping on the sofa as an old man, you think it’s Amitabh Bachchan. He has shades of Sonu Nigam as well. TV anchor and actor Ravii Dubey is pretty fluid, and his many disguises as a conman work really well. So Matsya Kaand is about a conman and a cop playing a cat and mouse game and it plays on MX Player.

The thread that runs through the show is the war Mahabharata, and the episodes are named after the characters in the war. And not just the name, the show manages to take the character through the episode. For example, the first episode is called ‘Abhimanyu’ and before you start singing the song refrain ‘Abhimanyu, chakravyuh mein phas gaya hai tu’ from Inquilaab (Amitabh Bachchan), you realise that the story of the brave warrior from the Mahabharata has parallels in the episode. Since it’s the first of 11 episodes, I realised that I had started looking forward to the interesting storytelling device the show uses: Piyush Mishra is Panditji, telling the stories of these characters and simultaneously preparing Matsya (Ravii Dubey) for his revenge. Remember Piyush Mishra telling stories to a captive audience in the film Tamasha? Somewhat like that but in prison!

Now you might groan at how one prison can have so many cool teaching moments, but then we have seen montages of men in prison exercising and becoming champion fighters in many movies. We have seen in Narcos Mexico (the third season) how an older man offers advice to a man who is not exactly a leader and see how he changes. Then why not get trained to become a conman by learning from men in prison?

That said, you will feel at times that the writers take the lazy way out and choose people and events you have seen a thousand times in movies. Yes, I’m talking about ‘a rich guy who is particular about keeping time and feeds his nasty looking dogs’ which is so '70s, also ‘man imagines the woman who walks towards him as a bride’, and to show a Muslim man answering questions honestly ‘because he’s in a place of worship’, ‘nasty step-fathers and long suffering mothers’...

Speaking of long suffering, I am not the only one who hates this trend of using rap songs in a title track. I blame Gully Boy the movie for it all. Just rhyming disasters is what they should be called: Matsya/Rahasya/Tapasya/Amavasya… Puhlees spare us! And then the gall of sampling the score of Dickinson (on AppleTV) and using it liberally! These are the ‘why did they do this’ moments of the show.

Despite the complaints I may have, the core idea of a conman using a cable guy to bet on cricket, how he uses a pretty girl (Zoya Afroz) to distract the club owner (the ever reliable Rajesh Sharma) keeps you engaged. This con game has been thought through really well.

But the second con seems to be haywire. The Rs50 crore wedding doesn’t look lavish enough, and it’s a little confusing to see a man who’s going to help ‘change black money to white’ suddenly play wedding planner.

That said, it is interesting to see Ravi Kishen play catch up to the con game quite well. He is an unkempt ACP, but he’s part of old Bollywood that has a tradition of long haired cops… I liked the streak of violence that he has. It keeps you surprised even though you might think it is a predictable thing for cops to be violent when angry. Compared to Ravi Kishen’s good yet bad cop, Ravii Dubey’s Matsya out to get his revenge conman is calmer.

Shrikant Verma as the ACP’s sidekick is very good. Madhur Mittal (you saw him in Slumdog Millionaire) overdoes it a bit (why does he need to eat so many fries in every scene in Jaipur?) but the coolest character in the show is played by Girish Sharma who is Bunty, the sidekick to the head of the betting baddie. His use of English words to express his take on the situation are just so well written and acted.

For city-born hacks like me, it was interesting to see the post office savings scam. But it is marred by the ‘lascivious post office guy who touches women inappropriately’ trope here…

So plenty of ups and downs in the show, and because the show hints at season two, I hope that they really push the envelope writing wise so there are fewer predictable scenes and characters. On OTT platforms, you have the luxury of multiple episodes to tell a story, and the only thing we the audience want is to not say, ‘Bahut kheencha!’