Director – Neeraj Pandey and Shivam Nair
Cast – Kay Kay Menon, Karan Tacker, Vinay Pathak, Vipul Gupta, and more.
IMDb Rating – 8.6/10
Special Ops Hotstar Review: Neeraj Pandey created the web series when theatres across the country have been shut due to the coronavirus pandemic, this reason has seemed to benefit the series. People have turned to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and equally to Hotstar for entertainment; however, we cannot compare which is better because everyone is looking out for entertainment at the time of self-isolation.
Special Ops series is an action gripping eight-episode Hotstar series and takes its own sweet time to glide towards suspenseful climactic buildups. One of the accumulations is a genuine now or never flashpoint. In contrast, the other turns out to be something allied to a red herring despite the whipping up a fair degree of anticipation and tension.
This is the kind of thriller we are talking about to you, it is a mixed bag with steady and neat details laced in a tad tentative. You may not be fully swooned by the final punch.
Pandey has directed the six-and-a-half-hour-long web series with Shivam Nair, and not to miss it is the elongated version of his 2015 silver screened actioner BABY.
Well, now that is not the wrong thing because it has clearly shorn the Islamophobic alarmism. Directors have maintained every single detail while crafting this tale. It is an action thriller of an undercover operation show as a straightforward drama about how spies are on the trail of a terror mastermind that nobody has even thought of.
In baby, Kay Kay Menon played the role of a principal bandit. In the Special Ops Hotstar web series, he is cast as an unbending RAW officer, named Himmat Singh. He is portrayed as a man who is single-mindedly in the pursuit of the main man who is behind the 2020 Parliament attack. The attacker is a slippery and shadowed figure who got away after the sinful attack. Although the whole web series is constructed around him, which means that he is the spine of the story.
The lead actor makes a solid point, not to play to the gallery. Instead, he opted for a subdued undemonstrated style. His disguised approach helps Menon helped him to maintain a steely aura where he continues the plain-seeking secret service of being the agent who inevitably knows way too much but plays like he doesn’t know anything. He plays a patient waiting game, which unfailingly explains why clearly explains why the action in Special Ops literally spans for two decades and unfolds at a pondering pace. Don’t worry, it will not bore you!
Himmat Singh is a family man and is married to Gautami Kapoor, who has only a faint knowledge of what her man has to reckon with daily. He is so anxious about his teenage daughter Pari (Revati Pillai) that he crosses all the borders of privacy. He goes to the extreme extent of cloning her mobile phone to track her each and every moment. I mean, no one wants to hinder their privacy like this!
The genre of special ops is slightly different from the other Bollywood genres but is similar to series like State of Siege 26/11 and The Family Man. The regular romantic kind that is the staple food of Bollywood seems to deviate in these series as it is driven by the situating Himmat Singh’s mission, which is the sole purpose of his grand face existence with external enemies – which by the way is way more important than anything else. This theme can be slightly seen going against the backdrop of the departmental and the domestic pressure that our unbending officer has absorbed as he moves forward with his risk-filled plan.
The villain that is being played by Sajjad Delafrooz is a hate-spewing monster that usually every Bollywood villain is starting from the most famous one Gabbar Singh. He very neatly blends himself in a quiet and self-assured way that is sophisticated behaviour that makes everyone believe that he is the right person. Nobody even doubts what kind of evil he is.
Himmat’s theory that the Parliament attack was planned by a man who slipped would simply slip under the radar and got easily escaped through the safety must be within or outside the spy agency. Still, the officer is so sure that he is on the right track, and no one can distract him from his mission. His finished work attracts all the unwanted attention from a peeved minister played by Suhaila Khan, a young gunman who tries to make an attempt on his life and sections of officialdom who viewed his ways with a mix of suspicion and envy.
Special Ops Hotstar Series is a gratuitous drama that is proceeded into formal proceedings. It is work based on fiction based but actual events where the gap between fantasy and truth is restrained. Although the five Indians who used to work for Himmat Singh, including two women, could take endless adversaries in their plates to show their loyalty for the mission.
Men working for him are tall, and girls are strong. These action heroes have moulded their trigger happiness scenes in the series. However, Himmat Singh is the central brain behind the mission and doesn’t get involved in any physical fights. He is the lad with minds! The best thing we loved about the series is that the actors who are playing the secondary roles in the movie are not exactly left out, they have also got the great play to act.
The series clearly doesn’t have any hint of blossoming romance, yes there is a relationship between Bala and Tanya, the daughter of an Indian envoy in Turkey but is pursued only for a while and then is left dangling in-between. As we said, these series are different from Bollywood staples.
Karan Tacker, who is virtually the other male lead of the special ops, delivers an outstanding performance as a Delhi boy in the character of Farooq Ali. He is handpicked, especially by Himmat, to be his special man in Dubai. Muzzamil Ibrahim plays a snipper as Avinash, who operates out of Baku. Farooq holds the cards that could reveal the identity of the never seen Ikhlaq Khan, who is the man who is desperately chased by the Indian secret agencies.
The twist that will fascinate you is when Farooq’s manipulation of people around the powerful Hafiz, his most trusted people. A considerable part of the movie revolves around the adult inquiry done by Himmat Singh. To add spice to the series a shady oilfield deal in Baku, a brief interrogation conducted for 26/11. A reference put forward by the minister’s son in the Russian tech deal and the arrest of a human trafficker who makes a deal of a poor Muslim girl to the gulf are the incidents that have been added among the other things.
Although, after adding all these things to the series, nothing could make the special ops lose the plot.
