Crimes And Clues:
Nobody believes police investigations are fun; in reality they mostly involve the tedium of interrogating recalcitrant witnesses or going over clues again and again, till there is a breakthrough. Still, police procedurals are a popular TV and web genre, because the boring work is somehow made entertaining for the screen. The TV series CID ran for years, and has entered the realm of cult shows, the dialogue of which is used as comic relief or tribute in other Indian crime shows.
“Kuchh to gadbad hai,” says ACP Avinash Verma (Manoj Bajpayee), like the great ACP Pradyuman, as he plunges into a complicated investigation for the second time. The first was in Silence: Can You Hear It in 2021, now writer-director Aban Bharucha Deohans brings the same principal cast back in Silence 2: The Night Owl Bar Shootout, for a new case. The intriguing title is one of best things about the too-long film that plods along for most part through a small field of red herrings.
ACP Verma heads a fictional Special Crimes Unit, which seems under imminent threat of shut down, for some unexplained reason. He has just finished thrashing a man for harassing a hooker on the street (“no means no), when he gets a call from the commissioner to go check a shoot out at the Night Owl Bar. “If no one important has died,” says the supercop, “let the local police deal with it.” Turns out a minister’s secretary and a journalist are among the eight corpses. The pointing to political shenanigans is sadly nipped right there as ACP Avinash throws words like splatter pattern and trajectory, before concluding that the target was someone else.
Concentrating on just the case could be a good thing, but here, Deohans does not take a breather to show that Avinash’s team are even human or have lives outside the bullpen. The ACP himself, lives in a house with unpacked cartons, speaks once to a daughter on the phone, and as his assistant observes, is never seen eating. But he quotes poetry at the tea boy and is told by the boss to keep his inner Harishchandra in check, of which there is no indication. A crime show is as interesting as its lead investigator, and ACP Avinash has no personality, just a wardrobe full of jackets, he never repeats. The names of his team of three (Prachi Desai, Vaquar Shaikh, Sahil Vaid), barely register, and they serve little purpose except to walk beside or behind ACP. To him falls the job of knitting his brow and muttering, why? Or the occasional cuss word, joining the dots when they appear, and making a self-righteous speech or two about duty.
The possible villain, Arjun (Dinkar Sharma) is a man who surrounds himself with theatre masks, hams away for an invisible audience and complains to his shrink that the auditorium was empty. Avinash and an alert cop in Jaipur (Shruti Bapna), unearth a human trafficking angle that actually has little to do with the Night Owl Bar. After over two hours of watching Avinash do the thing modern investigators do—going through call records, triangulating, tracing locations and chasing leads, it is a downer to hear a long winded narration of why the murders happened and whodunit, the culprit being someone who just turns up to listen to it. And the main clues are not all the blood spurt-petechiae jargon, but an old-fashioned matchbox! If it is possible to be more bored with a film after it is over, Silence 2 manages that, because after all the rushing about, weeping grannies, and shrieking kids, the revelation is totally off tangent.
Manoj Bajpayee has done better work on OTT, including the first part of this budding franchise—it ends with a call about the next case, so a Silence 3 is imminent—and this one does little justice to his talent. And there is no excuse for this dud, when there are just so many excellent crime shows for inspiration.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
