Cast: Bobby Deol, Anup Soni, Sameer Paranjpe
Class of ‘83, directed by Atul Sabharwal and inspired by the popular eponymous book by Hussain Zaidi has released on Netflix.
This film, starring Bobby Deol, takes us back in time to the Mumbai of the early ‘80s. The initial portions of the film play out as a series of cross-cut scenes, set in 1983 and 1981 respectively. At the centre of both sets of scenes is the super cop Vijay Singh (Bobby Deol).
While the scenes in 1981 show Vijay as a marauding encounter specialist hunting gangsters down by will, the scenes in 1983 show him as a morose, brooding headmaster of a police training academy. We quickly gather that this is a ‘punishment posting’ and it is intriguing to imagine what events in the intervening two years might have led to this.
As the scenes unfold, we learn more about his story. He has faced personal tragedy. He’s lost his wife to a terminal illness and work has kept him from taking adequate care of her. As a double whammy, we realize he’s been played at work too, by a corrupt politician hand in glove with a wanted local gangster.
Now there is obviously nothing novel about this plot build up, and we’ve seen this employed multiple times in the past in cop films. However, where Class of ’83 tries to differentiate itself is in the second act, where we see Vijay gunning for revenge as he recovers from his personal trauma.
He conjures a unique revenge model, built around subversion of rules and protocols. Through unconventional training methods, he creates and mentors an encounter team of five graduating police cadets, who though academically mediocre come across as extremely street-smart. He trains these cadets on how to play around the rules and more specifically, on how to cover their tracks. He likens this team to ‘anti-bodies’, who would cleanse the corrupt system once injected inside.
This set up seemed fascinating and I was hoping the film would shift gears from this point. However, I wasn’t completely satisfied with how it all panned out. For starters, I had a problem with the film’s length. This might sound counter-intuitive to what critics usually hark about, but I felt the run time of 98 minutes wasn’t adequate at all for this film’s theme and range.
I would have liked the film to accentuate more on the various building blocks, even if it meant a greater investment of time in certain sections of the story. For instance, we see an elaborate stretch that covers the training regime the cadets go through at the institute. However after that, the film rushes through the second act where these cadets perform encounter operations in real life.
For instance, I loved the first such operation that these cadets execute. This scene was superbly written and choreographed, and really livened things up. But this left me wanting more, whereas the film rattled forward at breakneck speed, almost in a montage-like manner, barely skimming the surface of the potential this stretch had to offer. I know Mumbai is known for its pace of life, but this was a bit too much even by those standards!
I would have also loved to see more variety in the writing. As mentioned before, a great amount of time is dedicated to scenes at the cadet training institute. However, though we keep hearing about ‘unconventional’ methods, we hardly get to witness any such scene, save perhaps one where Vijay uses a real maggot-infested corpse to ‘create’ a crime scene for his students to examine.
An important aspect in this film is also the time-period setting. Set in the early eighties, you would expect the film to be full of visual cues transporting one back in time. However, apart from a vague neon tint to impart a noirish visual feel, this aspect is greatly underplayed.
Class of ’83 is not without its moments. It does have some gritty scenes and provocative sequences. My favourite one was where we see some of these cadets having their heads turned by dirty money and falling to amoral depths. But keeping true to the theme, even these promising scenes are rushed through and barely allowed to register.
Class of ’83 definitely had a lot of potential. What it needed was greater depth in the writing and perhaps even an episodic narration to really make an impression. As it stands, it feels quite shallow. I’m not a big fan of making comparisons, but I couldn’t help wonder if maybe an Anurag Kashyap would have treated this material very differently!
Overall rating: 2/5
