SACRED GAMES
★★★★ NETFLIX / OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-4
CREATED BY Vikramaditya Motwane CAST Saif Ali Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Radhika Apte, Jatin Sarna
PLOT In modern-day Mumbai, honest but under-performing cop Sartaj Singh (Khan) receives a call from gangster Ganesh Gaitonde (Siddiqui), missing for 16 years. After Gaitonde tells him he has 25 days to save the city from an unspecified calamity, Singh sets out to solve the mystery. BASED ON A 2006 crime epic by Vikram Chanda, Netflix’s first Indian Original is an unflinching roll through the grit of Mumbai (and its former incarnation Bombay), which offers a bloody contrast to the crisp, bright cinematic India we’ve become used to via Bollywood’s typically glammy output.
This is an eight-part cops-andgangsters thriller with a vicious streak and against-the-clock propulsion, whose two strands simultaneously concern ‘the only straight cop in town’ and an incredibly ruthless mobster who rises to the top of the organised-crime heap. The first weaves through Mumbai, as Saif Ali Khan’s disgraced policeman Sartaj Singh (suspended for not being corrupt enough) works with an eager intelligence analyst (Apte) to save the city from a major threat, all the while trying to figure out what connection he has to the supposedly ghosted gang boss who alerted him to the incoming disaster. The second flashes back to ’80s Bombay, with the aforementioned gang boss, Ganesh Gaitonde (Siddiqui), relating his deadly evolution from bullied street kid to underworld overlord.
In both its halves, Sacred Games brazenly flirts with crime-genre cliché. There are assassination attempts which explode into bullet-fests; there’s an episode in which a reluctant innocent wears a wire before things inevitably go wrong; there’s a short-fused Mob lieutenant; and there is Singh himself, whose rigid morality is sorely tested. But showrunner Vikramaditya Motwane, who directs alongside Anurag Kashyap (a filmmaker Danny Boyle cited as a big influence on Slumdog Millionaire), adds the occasional surreal or almost supernatural touch. The opening shot is of a yelping dog falling to its death from the top of a high-rise, while the character of Gaitonde comes with some Keyser Soze-ish mythical flourishes and an unsettling conviction that he is a god. Which means, of course, he gets to narrate.
Both main roles are impressively played. Siddiqui is a small guy with a huge presence and a relaxed, Omar Sharifchannelling charm, which he serves chilled to the point of cold-blooded. His Gaitonde barely even breaks a sweat when beating a man to death with a rock. Khan’s Singh, by contrast, is a study in discomfort: bruised and burly, hardly fitting into his straining, sweat-saturated shirts and tight-wrapped turban, so determined to do things right he keeps getting things wrong, and rarely without physical punishment. A sagging, frowning punch bag, he’s less heroic than incurably stubborn.
It says everything that when either actor is on screen, you don’t miss the other. Together but separate, they ensure each of this twisted tale’s halves is distinct yet equally intriguing, forming a portrait of a Mumbai we’ve never explored before. VERDICT Part crime epic, part countdown-to-destruction espionage thriller, Sacred Games comes on like a bastard blend of Narcos and 24.