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The honors the earlier seasons of this series has won nationally and internationally has made the makers take this one up pretty seriously and ambitiously as well. The action spans Thailand, Assam, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Mumbai besides Delhi, and this time, when Delhi’s DCP (Deputy Commissioner of Police) Vartika Chaturvedi is punitively transferred to Assam, she encounters a truckload of young girls who are being taken to Delhi while intercepting what the police are tipped off is a truck carrying an arms shipment.
When her local bosses disapprove of her investigating the case of trafficking, Vartika defiantly moves to Delhi, her hometown, and starts working on it with her old team, headed by Bhupendra Singh (Rajesh Tailang). Her deputy, Neeti (Rasika Dugal) is headed for a divorce, while Vartika’s husband, Vishal (Denzil Smith), an Additional Commissioner, often has to face the music for her drastic, unorthodox ways and passionate and personalized methods of working against society’s villains.
And the villains are, she comes to know, Badi Didi a.k.a. Meena (Huma Qureshi) and her partner, Vijay (Sano Di Nesh), helped by Kusum (Sayani Gupta), who arrange young escorts for one John Gupta (Kelly Dorji) in Thailand. Meena’s prime helper early on is Kalyani (Mita Vashisht), an unscrupulous and cold woman who is audaciously shameless. The two acquire through various means (community marriage, poor households et al) girls from families, supplying them to the highest bidder and fooling the girls about jobs and a great life. Kusum and Kalyani help Meena make the kidnapped girls show superficial beauty with overdone makeup and tell them how to “dominate” men rather than be scared of them.
Bit by relentless bit, Vartika and her dedicated team unravel the complex racket in which even a two-year-old infant (Noor) is seriously wounded and critical, and has been abandoned by a woman who is not even her mother. All as a tangential part of the same racket.
The dark overtones of the camerawork and the background score help, but at the same time, I must confess that this season, probably because of the encomiums mentioned above, does take itself too seriously and so, ironically, goes down the ladder of excellence. Many clues and facts are ‘found’ too easily, there are few real twists, the game is too easy on many an occasion, the back-stories too sketchy. Why was Kusum in the racket? Why is only Sonam officially reported as missing? What is the justification for Vijay’s involvement and his exact bonding with Meena? And who is ‘Bhaiji’? These are some questions that demand answers. Last but not the least, Meena’s sermonizing to Vartika looks more than a shade ‘filmi’ and needlessly inflicted. Incredibly, Vartika listens to it all even as if she has told Meena to lay down her pistol, which she stubbornly and wryly does not!
Despite a string of loaded performances, the show in the end, finally just satisfies but never enthralls, especially in the way the unpredictable second season did. Shefali is gritty and placidly intense as always, Huma is excellent, Mita Vashisht superb and a whole ensemble of powerful players support them, including Yukti Thareja as ASI Simran Masih, Anshumaan Pushkar as Rahul, Sano Di Nesh and Aditi Subedi as Khushi besides dependable talents like Rajesh Tailang, Rasika Dugal, Sayani Gupta, Denzil Smith and especially Celestia Bairagey as the seemingly docile but smart Sonam.
Delhi Crime 3 can thus be your cup of tea as a thriller addict, but maybe the next time, director Tanuj Chopra and the writers and producers can get more meat and less needless flab into the concoction.
Rating: ***1/2 (Almost)
Netflix presents Golden Karavan’s, Ivanhoe Productions’, FilmKaravan’s & Poor Man’s Productions’ Delhi Crime 3 Produced by: Robert Friedland Directed by: Tanuj Chopra Written by: Apoorva Bakshi, Tanuj Chopra, Anu Singh Choudhary, Michael Hogan, Shubhra Swarup & Mayank Tewari Music: Ceiri Torjussen Starring: Shefali Shah, Huma Qureshi, Rasika Dugal, Rajesh Tailang, Denzil Smith, Adil Hussain. Denzil Smith, Yashaswini Dayama, Sayani Gupta, Anurag Arora, Gopal Datt, Sidharth Bhardwaj, Jaya Bhattacharya, Aakash Dahiya, Yukti Thareja, Anshumaan Pushkar, Mita Vashisht, Sano Di Nesh, Celesti Bairagey, Aditi Subedi, Kelly Dorji & others
