The Great Indian Murder review: Ashutosh Rana shines in this convoluted tale

Ashutosh Rana in 'The Great Indian Murder' on Disney+Hotstar'. (Image: screen grab)

Writer-director Tigmanshu Dhulia’s world in The Great Indian Murder is full of sleazy men and women who strip at a moment's notice. But there’s a bigger problem with the telling of the tale than the world the writer builds. Before we get to guns, we have a hurdle to cross: If a typical Bollywood bad guy, Vicky Rai - a womanising son of a politician, who’s drunk, rude and possesses no redeeming qualities -  dies, does anyone in the audience care?

The show starts with Vicky Rai pimping an actress to Nigerian men for business favours. She says no, but he provides two young girls instead and they’re killed in his farmhouse. Really, who brings this shady business to their own home? And then transports the bodies in the back of their own SUV? When even an ordinary housewife in the short film Chutney knows that you plant mirchi and dhaniya over the dug up inner courtyard of the house to get rid of a dead manservant?

Back to the show, as they say. Three people at the party are caught with guns. And the police think they must’ve murdered Vicky Rai. The waiter, a strange tribal lad who had no business being at the party and a retired civil servant who’s been behaving like Mahatma Gandhi. The last bit is not remotely funny.

The father of the dead lad is Jagannath Rai (Ashutosh Rana is so good at such roles, he probably played it with his eyes closed), a politician who needs to save his career by making sure his son stays out of jail. Pardon me for laughing, but which politician ever uses their own money for such tasks?

Richa Chadha is Sudha Bhardwaj (no connection to the real-life lawyer activist), the police officer in charge of the case, but the government sends CBI officer Suraj Yadav at the request of the father to take over the case. Pratik Gandhi plays Suraj Yadav and very clearly we know that he’s working for the sleazy chief minister.

Akira Kurosawa gave us the superb Rashomon, where you see one event from four different points of view. It has spawned mostly terrible copies (both in books and in the movies) that makes a viewing of a series like this tiring. So there are four episodes telling you how the people landed a spot at Vicky Rai’s party: the waiter, the tribal lad, the ex-civil servant and of course the father. Richa Chadha and Pratik Gandhi ask the suspects their story. And no, this is not even The Usual Suspects.

Munna waiter (Shashank Arora) claims innocence, and finally tells us he was in love with Jagannath’s daughter and was helping her run away from her home and her rapist brother Vicky Rai. He claims he has a gun for self-defence, since bad guys were chasing him when he purloined a black bag full of money. His story is fine, but as Richa Chadha says, "Kaun vishwas karega (who’ll believe you)?"

Eketi is the tribal lad from Andamans who tells the story of one welfare officer (Sharib Hashmi) who is helping him locate and bring back an ancient idol of their God. He claims he has travelled from the Andamans to Kolkata, to Chennai and Sahibgunj and then located the idol at the party. Why he has a gun in his bag no one knows. "We can call him Naxal and kill him so the Home minister cuts a sympathetic figure," has all kinds of racist overtones.

The dumbest suspect is Mohan Kumar, a retired civil servant who has started to channel Mahatma Gandhi because he was struck on the head with a Gandhi lathi falling off a statue. Totally unfunny, though, to see Raghubir Yadav as Mohan Kumar who’s described by his driver as a ‘shababi, kababi buddha’ (a rude way to describe someone one who eats non veg and pursues women), a sleazebag who insists he wanted goat milk because he was Mohan Das.

Richa Chadha meets this Mohan Das avatar for two minutes and says to her junior, ‘Can’t stand this!’ Imagine the plight of the audience who saw him with his mistress.

Vicky Rai’s father, too, looks like he’s a suspect (it’s Ashutosh Rana, who has played the bad guy in so many movies, he must’ve got his son killed). He sends his bodyguard Prithvi (Deepraj Rana must be exhausted playing these roles by now, no?) to kidnap the movie star’s sister so she doesn’t say rude things about Vicky Rai…

There is a strange journalist duo spying on all the political characters; why, we don’t know, because they contribute little to the narrative. There’s Billoo Biryani who kidnaps kids for ransom, the welfare officer’s strange life with his sister in law, Richa Chadha’s drunk brother and his girlfriend, and yes, the bedridden husband… There’s the incest angle to Vicky Rai, there’s betrayal from cops and even though everything has been shot well, your interest in the story flags. You don’t care if Mohan Kumar is faking it or no, you don’t care what Vicky’s sister is called, you don’t care to find out what happened to the actress’s sister who was kidnapped…

And in telling the tale which gets too convoluted for its own good, you lose interest by episode 4 and just let the story play out… Ajay Devgn and Disney+Hotstar have put in a lot of resources to make the story look good. This is an official web series based on Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects. We were fed up with just the four. The Great Indian Murder story turns out to be not so great after all.