Review |'Dial 100': Manoj Bajpayee excels in his triple role film

Manoj Bajpayee in a still from 'Dial 100', streaming on Zee5.

That Manoj Bajpayee can play a cop like no one else can, is a given. That said, he also plays a husband and a father brilliantly in Dial 100, a movie that just dropped on Zee5.
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So it’s raining in Bombay. The perfect setting for crime, as all Bollywood directors know (plus the city looks gorgeous drenched in the rains). Senior Police Inspector Nikhil Sood (Such a Dilliwallah name!) has just come into the emergency call centre. Before he can take any call, his wife Prerna (Sakshi Tanwar, who’s either complaining or crying) calls to complain about their son Dhruv partying too much.

Thankfully, the tea guy is practically everywhere, offering hot comfort. The camaraderie among the police on duty is shown rather nicely, even though cops eating vada pav seems as cliched as American cops eating doughnuts.

As soon as they start getting emergency calls, I wondered if this was going to be like the Korean series on Netflix called Voice. The set up in the control room looks very similar to that show. And I’m excited to see that Manoj Bajpayee is going to use his superior listening skills to save lives. Or was it going to be like the Halle Berry film The Call, where she plays a 911 Emergency Call Center executive…***

The trailer shows Neena Gupta calling in about justice and revenge. So I watch as I realise that this film is much more than a Manoj Bajpayee showcase. What is a father to do if his son is lying to everyone? How do you bring back a wayward son to the straight and narrow, especially when he’s an adult and all his friends are partying? Does slapping a young man do any good? Do parents have to always play good cop, bad cop in order to hold on to a child? Does that ever work?

The exchange between Manoj Bajpayee, the father, and Sakshi Tanwar, the mother, will hit home for every person who is a parent of a young adult. I was afraid for both of them, knowing that kids once addicted to quick money will never want to live ordinary lives. That Nikhil and Prerna’s son Dhruv is lying, you as the audience know. You also understand why Prerna has to plead, ‘Do not harm my son, please!’

Neena Gupta plays an aggrieved mother who chooses the supposed rainy night to exact revenge on…
Speaking of rain, it seems to magically disappear when Dhruv is wandering all over Bombay on the bike with his partner-in-crime. Even when Neena Gupta and Sakshi Tanwar are stopped and the car-checked. And it made me chuckle when the IT guy showed up in the server room with a dripping jacket but his hair was impeccable...

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Why Manoj Bajpayiee does not share the weird jeopardy he finds himself in with the rest of the cops (they all seem to be friendly) just because his son is a bad apple, seems to be too simplistic. Solidarity would have worked better… And perhaps saved the life of the one super surprise in the movie.

The final conversation between Neena Gupta and Manoj Bajpayee is quite intense and works, and the end makes you sigh into the darkness. Both Sakshi Tanwar and Manoj Bajpayee prove once again that they can make you weep. You wish the sadness that has enveloped Nikhil when he makes that last call goes away. You realise that the screen has faded to black, and you are hoping they’d pick up that phone call…