A massive money laundering operation being tracked by a crack IB team is the main focus of Bejoy Nambiar’s eight-episode series, ‘Kaala’. Kaala as in Black as in money? Ok then. Now, if it had kept its focus on the cat-and-mouse chase, there may have been some degree of clarity in this web series. But the flashbacks and leap forwards in and around Kolata, Darjeeling, Punjab, New York, London and various other locations, as well as spots of strife around the India-Bangladesh border going back several decades, and the numbers of characters floating in and out, is nothing but incoherent mess.
IB officer Ritwick Mukherjee (Avinash Tiwary: this is his week, headlining two big series) and his team, which includes sharpshooter Sitara (Nivetha Pethuraj) have zeroed in on the kaala dhandha of Naman Arya. But it’s not a simple snatch-and-grab operation. Politicians (Mita Vashishtha as the CM of Bengal, who is not as straight as she appears) and other figures in authority have to be kept happy to be able to get close to the suave Arya who graces magazine covers and VIP functions. Things go belly-up when one of Ritwick informers is killed, and a can of worms which go back in time (1980, 1990) spills open, and one by one, big reveals start to pop up.
Who is this informer? What connection does he have to Ritwick, who has grown up in the shadow of discredited army man father Shubendu (Rohan Vinod Mehra)? Who was responsible for him being shamefully dubbed a traitor? And what, in turn, is Ritwick’s connection to said informer’s daughter, budding footballer Aloka (Elisha Mayor)? Old friends turned enemies, played by Saurabh Sachdeva and Jitin Gulati, turn up to demand their pound of flesh. Same-sex lovers, ethical hackers, a man caught in a woman’s body, exploited tea-estate labourers, killers who like photographing their victims, a team of accountants trawling through cooked books. And more.
Complex strands need to be knit in with skill. But here the writing is all over the place. And confusion is completely confounded.
Kaala cast: Avinash Tiwary, Nivetha Pethuraj, Mita Vashishtha, Rohan Vinod Mehra, Elisha Mayor
Kaala director: Bejoy Nambiar
