Rahul Desai
A revenge story set against the backdrop of the Punjabi music industry – is that the film-making remains oblivious of these missteps. The first six episodes are streaming now, and it already feels like 5 too many.
This becomes evident within the opening five minutes itself, when the protagonist yells “pyaar zeher hota hai, aur mera zeher tu hai! (“love is poisonous, and you’re my poison”) at an ex-girlfriend
With The Fundamentals of The Craft. The cameos, too, are so self-serving that it may as well have been a reality show. The awful acting all around proves that a good director makes all the difference.
Characters react because they must, not because they’re human. He behaves like mid-2000s Emraan Hashmi character stuck in the rough cut of a Sandeep Reddy Vanga movie.
Shots are out of focus, the dubbing lacks design, dialogue wrestles with a persistent score, and long-drawn scenes bear no indication of belonging to a larger narrative. It’s also the kind of technically fragile series where even the foley effects go awry.
It is that it has an expansive 28-song soundtrack – spanning rap, folk, pop and classical by Punjabi artists past and present – but the storytelling fails to transcend its glorified music-video vibe.