“It’s impossible, and you are late,” a mentor tells Avinash, the protagonist of Disney+Hotstar’s The Freelancer, while stipulating the conditions of an unlikely rescue mission. The miserable odds have been stated, the overwhelming roadblocks pointed out, but it obviously takes a man in search of redemption to do something that no one else would. As is typical of Neeraj Pandey’s (creator and showrunner here) creations, The Freelancer is frantic, dizzying in scale, but also lacking in the clinching emotional clarity that can extract memorable characters from trained stereotypes. As a muscular travelogue, the show switches terrain and territory audaciously well, but the spectacle of it all is never quite supported by writing that humanizes. The slick machinery, so to speak, isn’t fed the fuel it deserves and yet, it is entertaining to watch it dash across the screen, whirring and screeching familiar noises and running old races.
Mohit Raina, plays Avinash, aka ‘The Freelancer’, a former cop-turned-mercenary who does jobs across continents and jurisdictions. His introduction is a semi-thrilling assassination of an asset in Kabul. It’s a sequence that builds the myth before diving into the grounding trauma behind it. Inayat (Sushant Singh), Avinash’s former colleague from his days in the police force, commits suicide outside the American consulate in Mumbai. The reason, as Avinash’s somewhat juvenile investigation reveals, is Aliya (Kashmira Pardeshi), Inayat’s daughter who has been duped by a radicalized Muslim family. Married to a fraudulent lover and severed from her family, Aliya ends up in a Syrian town, from where she must be rescued against odds that not even some nation states would be willing to entertain. The Freelancer, of course, is a different beast.
To attempt the impossible, Avinash requests the help of his handler, former intelligence man Arif, played matter-of-factly by Anupam Kher. Arif operates out of a civilian library, and dumbs down terrorism for men who should, in hindsight, know it by heart. “I call them what they are, the Islamic State,” he says at one point to assert the well-oiled machinery of terrorism and diplomacy that Avinash is gearing to go up against. The scraggy nature of dialogue is the hallmark of espionage that wants to hurriedly paint a picture, without using anything but the centre of the canvas. The declarations are swiftly made, enemies christened in a rush, and men urged to suit up so you hitch your wagon to the action that follows, and not to the morality that will forever trail behind. It’s a primer intended to assure the audience of the noble intent behind the bloodletting that is imminent. Except The Freelancer takes awful long to get there.
To Raina’s broad-chested and steely exterior, the show employs the designs of a difficult past. Alcoholism, domestic violence and a penchant for righteousness serve as familiar backdrops to a disgruntled cop who has gone rogue. His camaraderie with Inayat forms the mainspring of his leap into a suicidal mission, but Avinash is essentially a broken instrument looking for a meaningful swansong. Guilt ravages his memory the way purpose eludes his present. He kills without looking, but behind those dumbfounded, emotionless eyes, the show tells us, there is an ocean of suffering and regret waiting to spill over. Maybe this is how he reconciles the two for he holds alcoholic drinks in his hand, to test his mental resolve. A mission, in more ways than one, is Avinash’s only language of comprehension.
Raina is adept as the overbearing, but also flawed mercenary at the heart of the show, but can feel a tad robotic and ineffectual in scenes that could have used tenderness. For all the hype and glamour associated with the title’s more sensual interpretations, the show, though it wanders with ease, rarely explodes into action. It’s still in its first half of an entire season, but other than the sequence that preps Avinash as a pragmatic, unsentimental executioner of tricky assignments, there is little to actually colour him with. A fist fight in the rain with a couple of policemen is adequate but hardly as impressive for a man built – both literally and metaphorically – as the headline act of a series. For all the particularity of the many landscapes its parses through, when it comes down to the actual action, the series can’t quite lift the material.
The Freelancer, though teased as a heightened actioner, huffs and puffs in its first four episodes. Its attempts to marry dreary intimate backstories to espionage just about pass the test of plausibility. It’s watchable, especially on its travels but everything it does on home territory feels draggy. Turns out, the world of espionage has become the victim of its own globetrotting glory. The moment it urges you to consider the modest, unremarkable lives hidden behind the trail of headlines and epoch-driving events, it loses the tautness, the simulated joy of something so aggressively self-important, it manufactures its own dodgy intrigue. This first half of The Freelancer is nowhere close to the performative highs of a Special Ops or even the character study of a Khakee, but it just about sets the apparatus for a second half that should, put bluntly, commit to the rampage as opposed to the rumination.
The Freelancer - Part 1 dropped on Disney+Hotstar on September 1, 2023.
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