Glossy, jazzy and sharply cast, Pandey’s new Netflix series, starring Emraan Hashmi, retools the cerebral-cop formula as a stylish smuggling saga, where ingenuity, not brute force, drives both crime and the chase
When I was a cub reporter starting my career at a fast-paced newsroom, one of the tasks routinely assigned to me was compiling funny, offbeat and/or extreme snippets of news from around the world — a dog that meowed like a cat, the world’s largest bottle gourd, a man who survived lightning bolts repeatedly; you get the drift. And some of the wildest stories of this nature emanated from Customs officers at the world’s largest and busiest airports, including New York, London, Mumbai et al. People would find ridiculous and awe-inspiring ways to smuggle gold, drugs and other valuables, using whatever combination of bodily cavities and secret-luggage-compartments they could deploy in the moment.
The opening episode of Neeraj Pandey’s entertaining, inventive new Netflix series Taskaree (Pandey has created the show and also directed a couple of episodes) introduces audiences to the ingenuity of contemporary smugglers through a well-executed opening montage that follows three different couriers (or ‘popat’ as they are called in the Bambaiyya Hindi register of the show) of different ages and backgrounds, about to arrive at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport. A heavyset young woman has swallowed a significant amount of heroin-wrapped-in-capsules, an elderly lady is carrying luxury watches that have been assembled so cunningly that they appear like cheap Casios from the outside and finally, a young man has replaced the internal circuitry of his laptop with solid gold plates. As Superintendent Arjun Meena (Emraan Hashmi) informs the audience via voice-over: “Kabhi jeet hamaari hoti hai, kabhi unki, aur kabhi hum dono ki (Sometimes we win, sometimes they win and sometimes we both win).”
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This sequence sets the tone for the rest of Taskaree — it takes Neeraj Pandey’s ‘cerebral cop’ template (from shows like Special Ops and films like A Wednesday) and applies it to the colourful, bling-y world of international smuggling. Hashmi’s shrewd Superintendent Meena and his team of officers are pitted against an international syndicate led by ace smuggler Bada Chaudhary (Sharad Kelkar), an unusually thoughtful and fastidious kingpin (“I don’t like coercion”, he admits to a Customs officer during the second episode) operating out of picturesque Milan.
Heist movie hi-jinks
Although Taskaree has been written as a police procedural, in terms of style and visual presentation it owes far more to 21st century heist films like Ocean’s Eleven and The Usual Suspects, as well as the BBC series Hustle. There are two principle ways in which this influence becomes apparent. The first is Taskaree’s usage of the musical montage—while explaining character backstories or taking the audience through a step-by-step deconstruction of a sophisticated smuggling operation, the show’s ‘elementary particle’ is the montage. The second is the music itself, a high-energy, jazzy score that sounds like it was recorded at a Las Vegas casino. It is reminiscent (in a really, really good way) of Magnus Fiennes’ famous, jazz-heavy score for the BBC series Hustle, snazzy trumpets and kinetic bongos layered over hand-claps for the chase sequences and explaining-the-heist scenes. This is composer Advait Nemlekar’s best work yet, a definite step up from his competent but largely by-the-numbers score for Pandey’s previous series Special Ops.
For example, we are shown the origin story of Superintendent Meena’s righteous, straight-lines colleague Ravinder Gujjar (Nandish Singh Sandhu) — he belongs to a family of bribe-taking officers whose ostentatious displays of wealth sickened him as a youngster, prompting him to take the exact opposite path in his own career. Instead of making this a dialogue-heavy slog, Taskaree opts for a snappy musical montage instead (shot as a parody of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’s famous opening sequence), showing us Ravinder’s hilarious, fed-up expression of disgust and disbelief at his family’s latest ill-gotten acquisition — a remarkably ugly silver statue of two stallions in unison, neighing at the skies. To be honest, if someone in my family acquired a knick-knack that ugly, I would consider disowning them on general principle. Props to the production design team of Taskaree, in fact, for crafting or unearthing an artefact of such magnificent and rarefied ugliness.
Strong characters, likeable performances
There are several other technical areas in which Taskaree is an improvement over Pandey’s previous projects. Hand-to-hand combat scenes in particular are so much better here—most fight scenes in Special Ops are badly shot and poorly executed by the actors, and they let the show down in a big way. Whereas in Taskaree, the fight scenes are of a completely different, much higher standard. I wasn’t surprised to discover the involvement of Cyril Raffaelli, who was also fight choreographer and stunt coordinator on Pandey’s film Baby, the only other time I have felt satisfied with fight scenes in a Neeraj Pandey project.
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At the end of the day, however, Taskaree’s strongest suit are its compelling performances, starting with Emraan Hashmi as Superintendent Meena. Like a lot of Neeraj Pandey leading men (especially Himmat Singh in Special Ops) Meena prefers brains over brawn, experience over youthful enthusiasm, and a leisurely game of chess over a frenetic foot chase. He is gruff and cynical, a thorough pragmatist. But he also has enough softness within him to allow moments of sympathy, especially for the hapless ‘popats’ or couriers that he regularly nabs. On one occasion, he catches an air-hostess called Priya (Zoya Afroz) as she is trying to smuggle gold bars on her body on the say-so of her fiancé, an airlines captain. When Meena informs Priya that her so-called fiancé is, in fact, a married father of two, the expression on his face is perfect—a world-weary cynic trying hard to be empathetic without being patronising. “Sabka kat-taa hai, life mein (Life screws us all over),” he says.
Kelkar is similarly excellent as Bada Chaudhary, eschewing traditional villainous-swag in favour of a more studied, calibrated approach, his inimitable baritone working overtime to lend gravitas to his character. But the show’s best supporting act comes from Amruta Khanvilkar, who plays Meena’s blunt-talking, borderline paranoid colleague Mitali Kamath, the so-called “human weighing scale” who can sniff out undeclared valuables just by looking at a bag. The way her character is introduced, a single mother warning the local sabji-wallah to fix his rigged scale, is absolutely perfect and Khanvilkar clearly has a lot of fun with the role.
Taskaree is another stellar entry to Neeraj Pandey’s rapidly expanding streaming portfolio, alongside the likes of Special Ops and the Khakee franchise. It utilises the charisma and screen presence of its leading man very well, and backs him up with a well-oiled ensemble that gets the job done in style.
Taskaree is currently streaming on Netflix
