GUNS AND GORE

Amazon Prime’s third Indian original, Mirzapur, comes four months after Netflix’s Sacred Games and releases on November 16, the same day as season three of one of the rival platform’s most popular shows, Narcos. Like those two crime-centred shows, Mirzapur has plenty of gangsters, violence and colourful abuses, albeit less drugs and nudity. Going by the first two episodes, Mirzapur is more likely to remind cinephiles of Anurag Kashyap’s two-part crime drama Gangs of Wasseypur, with its emphasis on family and the youthful energy of its leading characters. They include Guddu (Ali Fazal), Bablu (Vikrant Massey) and Munna (Divyendu Sharma), but the anchorman is Akhandanand Tripathi aka Kaaleen Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi), the most powerful man in Mirzapur.

The show’s co-creator Karan Anshuman, who also serves as one of the three directors, describes the nine-episode series as a “hinterland western”, in which fractured fatherson relationships and the burden of legacy is as important as gang wars and struggle for power. It’s evident in the parallel stories of the show’s main characters: the temperamental Munna, who is eager to take over the reins of Mirzapur from his father, and brothers Guddu and Bablu, who embark on a path ethically different from their father (Rajesh Tailang) because of uncontrollable circumstances. “We have taken what we have seen in the genre and tried to elevate it to the next level,” says Anshuman. The uncensored medium of web series becomes ideal in the quest. “We can portray violence without flinching. It is a little exaggerated, but it is relevant to the story.” Anshuman had also created Amazon’s first Indian original, Inside

Edge. He adds, “We’d love to have lot many explosions.” Director Gurmmeet Singh emphasises that the “gore and violence comes with underlying layer of humour”. “There’s immediacy with what’s happening rather than the sense of brooding that gets associated with the genre,” he says.

For Fazal, it was the writing— courtesy of Puneet Krishna, Vineet Krishnan and Anshuman—that convinced him to do his first web series. “Guddu is impulsive, full-hearted,” says Fazal, who plays a body-building enthusiast. The role sees Fazal break the romantic image he has carved in Bollywood to enact a more rough character.

Anshuman will be happy to return for season two, for which the series lays the groundwork. But it will be the viewers who will determine whether the talented cast should return for another round of swearing and shooting in small-town UP.