#TrailerReview: Mirzapur is a tribute to Gangs Of Wasseypur
‘Old wine in a new bottle’ is a great concept. But when crores are at stake, along with our precious binge-time, it is not appreciated. Not one bit.
In the 2.44-minute long trailer of Mirzapur, an Amazon Prime Original, produced under the banner of Excel Entertainment, there’s seldom a moment when you don’t feel the ghost of Wasseypur past peeping over your shoulder. And the ones in which you do, you are left underwhelmed.
The story goes as goes every such story. Kaleen bhaiya (Pankaj Tripathi) is a carpet trader by day and the undisputed mafia king of Mirzapur by night. He is evil, you know that by his stern stares and grave voice. And he is patriarchal, you know that by how he uses his wife (Rasika Duggal) for sex, with little or no emotion involved.
Like most fathers in positions of power, his sore thumb is his drug-addict, power-addict, near-bipolar son, Munna (Divyendu Sharma), who must prove himself worthy of his father’s crime ring. But, as stories usually go, a little too drunk in his newfound power, he ends up rubbing Guddu (Ali Fazal) the wrong way.
Guddu is the epitome of the angry young man image we’ve been fed over the decades — like a dormant volcano he lies, until someone pokes him into action. But the Munnas of the world are not alone. They are always piggybacking on their father’s clout. Kaleen bhaiya, therefore, must protect his Munna, while Guddu, with the help of his brother Bablu (Vikrant Massey), must rise to the occasion.
It’s time for a new king of the jungle. The old — both in thought and ideology — has to make way for the new, but he’s not going to be happy about it. There’s going to some clawing, some gnawing, and some roaring, and the fiercer of the two will survive. At this point, Mirzapur takes a nosedive. If the clichéd plotline wasn’t enough, it actually drives the point home with a background score that literally goes, “Welcome to the jungle.” In a cheesy nightclub-voice, that we're too conditioned to associate with car chases in films like Race or Dhoom, not with the dust clouds of the Hindi heartlands.
Mirzapur’s biggest problem is that it came six years too late after Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of Wasseypur has dug into our grey matter and build itself an Antilia. While all the actors do a fabulous job, it’s still somehow not as sinister as the characters Anurag had etched.
But they try. They really do. But when Ali Fazal wields a tamancha and mouths cuss words we have grown too accustomed to, we do not flinch. When Vikrant frowns, deepening the grooves on his forehead almost making a vein pop, all we notice is how his eyes do not seem to have enough rage. Even though they do fairly well, these boys are no Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and unfortunately, even against their will, they will be pitted against Nawaz.
At a point in the trailer, Ali goes, “Shuru majboori mein kiyein they, ab mazaa aa raha hai.” We hope that's what we end up saying on November 16th, when Mirzapur gets a nationwide release.