Criminal Justice is back with it’s new season, the second time in two years, Indian filmmakers have adopted Peter Moffat’s UK justice-system series. Criminal Justice is a Hotstar Special, an Indian Hindi-language legal drama web series written by Apoorva Asrani. The series stars Pankaj Tripathi, Kirti Kulhari, Khushbu Atre, and Jishu Sengupta. In the first season, Vikrant Massey was accused of murder as a taxi driver and was expected to ride the breakout success of the American version starring The Night of the Ridge Ahmed.
It was John Turturro, who stole the show as a small-time lawyer – and Madhav Mishra of the same local character Pankaj Tripathi did the same. Not surprisingly, unlike Moffat’s original, Madhav is one of the characters created for the next season, Criminal Justice: Behind Closed Doors. I understand moving forward the only decent thing of an oblivious season but forcing him into a more-than-oblivious season type to defeat the purpose of long-form television. This is a smart idea on paper, but an easy gimmick on the screen.
Second season of Criminal Justice –
This second season is essentially an earlier female makeover – in which Kirti Kulhari, as Anuradha Chandra. She was a vulnerable woman in a lawsuit to stab her husband Bikram (Jishu Sengupta), a well-known Mumbai-based lawyer. Madhav undoubtedly emerges as Miss Anu’s lawyer but is hardly necessary; That’s only because Tripathi is the OTT-platform MVP and the most popular actor of Hindi cinema. So Madhav encouraged the other character retained ex-co-worker Nikhat Hussain (Anupriya Goenka) to lead his defense.
The result is an eight-episode slow burn that is five episodes too long. Comforting the core of a narrative as well as an air-tight cultural translation. And quite frankly, after the release of Aira in the remake universe of Hotstar. The bar is high to reveal something like Criminal Justice: What It Is Behind Closed Doors: A Simple, Stretched with Moral Complexity of a Coconut, Unimaginable crime thriller.
Available on: Disney+ Hotstar
Cast of Criminal Justice season 2 –
Pankaj Tripathi, Kirti Kulhari, Jisshu Sengupta, Anupriya Goenka, Adrija Sinha, Mita Vashisht, Deepti Naval, Ashish Vidyarthi.
Director And Rating –
Arjun Mukherjee and Rohan Sippy is director. Criminal Justice season 2 got the rating 3.5 stars out of 5 stars.
Some bad news –
The bad news is that it has no business, so it is too much. With topics such as marital rape, mental health, domestic abuse, and toxic manhood at stake, it is indeed a minor miracle that one of them has not been judged. We know that she did it, hence why she forms the core of the case. But the conceit is thinly veiled and apparent from the get-go that it is unbelievable to stay patient with any of the people – especially and including Anu.
I know what that means, but at one point I really wanted to get Anu out of her idle stupa. Because her silence is all that enables the series to continue.
Problems with show –
Obviously, I have many problems with the show. I think the setting of marriage as a recurring theme to reflect marital discord at trial – feels very deliberate. The producers miss a trick or three by not infusing the physical location too, into the story: the city is Mumbai. But we just see the interiors of , upper-class Bandra bungalows, generic police stations, offices and prison courtyards. Madhav is actually a comic track, when he interacts with his goofy wife, the background score is all victorious. This is usually a telling sign of lazy writing: Comedy disrupts tragedy in the way that item lyrics carelessly clutter up the most intense plays. Anu’s lack of nuance is most visible during his prison life.
Every woman has a stale label: a brown-faced Naxalite, suicide rocker, clever alpha, pregnant victim. They talk to each other as if they were traffic signal’s reject extras, throwing subtlety as the charm of a Jissu Sengupta character.
He does this Bollywood-doctor-doctor-evil vibe to look suspicious – every line promotes facial contagion – which robs the moment of any suspense and ambiguity in the crucial episode. I know that the Criminal Justice series is more about the resolution process. But if Kajol continue to look scare, it would never be good to start watching Gupta.
Then there is a 12-year-old daughter, who performs so much with her traumatized and sensible-to-years personality that she is no surprise with her dead father. All in all, the series has just acted weird. Keerthi Kulhari, who looks like a young Sandra Bullock, fights a losing battle, and Anu’s tale has her kidnapped one-note portrayal of clinical depression.
Criminal Justice season 2: Review –
The series is not just adults who can investigate the psychological condition of the story while preventing its seriousness. This is especially painful when Madhava of Tripathi has learned the word “wok”. He needs to say things far beyond his reel wit. Yet the actor plays these moments as the playful headmaster who humiliates the chaotic children of a school saves like.
Last but not least, the show has some of the most shocking shot transitions in recent memory. Most of the times, the characters refuse to respond to their counterparts in one frame, and the scene ends. At other times, they simply exit a scene without warning. A particularly arrogant male investigating officer has a habit of replying to his boss with sarcastic one-liners and walking out of the room.
I am fully prepare to applause at the owners, but with my behavior. He is unable to be court-martialed every other day. According to the lawsuit: Every time two sets of lawyers make some headlines in court, the judge calls for adjournment. In a better show I would have read it as a necessary dig for the infamy of the Indian judicial system. But here it is a desperate tool to convert Moffat’s five episodes into eight. Given that Moffat’s UK series ran for only two seasons, nothing points to the danger of another Indian installment. If there is a third, however, this review is postponed until then.
READ MORE: IS GULLAK RENEWED FOR SEASON 3?