RAW Action:
“Commander aata hai to Bawander aata hai,” he declares– this RAW guy, who zooms about on a motorbike that has ‘Mavrick’ stamped on it and registration number 0101.
The eponymous Commander Karan Saxena (Gurmeet Chaudhary) is with RAW, so in a series (based on a book by Amit Khan) as hackneyed as this, he will be up against his counterpart in Pakistan’s ISI, Nasir Khan (Iqbal Khan). Nasir is fuming because his government released an Indian pilot, Captain Swadesh (Deepak Tokas) and that makes them look weak. Before any Indians can start making jingoistic statements, Nasir says that the Pakistani people are “zinda laash.” So it’s up to him to fight for the honour of his country. He decides to enter India clandestinely and kill Swadesh on his home turf.
When an undercover RAW agent is found dead, Karan is summoned to investigate. He teams up with ACP Rachna (Hruta Durgule), who is supposedly the best on the Mumbai Police Force. When they commence their investigation from the spot where the body was found, Rachna says “people talk to humans, not to cops,” and changes from her uniform to a strappy top, and then goes to the pier in a cop car with lights blazing!
The show, co-written and directed by Jatin Wagle, has many boo-boos like this—like the ISI chief having a meeting with his sleeper cell guys right in the street; a corrupt cop meeting Nasir on a boat wearing his uniform. Two crucial suspects are taken to the police station in an open jeep—making them easy targets for a passing shooter.
Even when Karan asks a perfectly normal question, Rachna responds as if he were flirting, with lines like “in school boys like you used to do my homework,” or “ladki ho ya mission, Karan chookta nahin.” He irritatingly mansplains to a top cop what a sleeper cell is.
The dialogue would have invited claps in a theatre— “this is not the old India, now there’s a madman leading it, who can do anything for his people.”
There is a lot of “now what?” head scratching, striding around in slow motion, and figuring out how and when Nasir will strike. The stakes are up, because the PM and CM are scheduled to attend a function to felicitate Swadesh, and if Nasir succeeds, it will be a disaster for India.
This kind of anti-Pak thriller has been made so many times that it would not be engaging even if it was brilliantly made; Commander Karan Saxena could not have been more run of the mill.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)
