Class Of ’83 review: No bang for your buck in this cop drama

Cops, gangsters, encounters and shootouts, Atul Sabharwal’s Class Of ’83 transports us to Bombay in the early 1980s, when crime was festering in the city's underbelly, spreading its tentacles far and wide.

Inspired by The Class of 83: The Punishers of Mumbai Police by journalist-author S Hussain Zaidi, the film takes us amidst a series of events that were creating massive upheaval in the country at the time. A nexus of politicians and gangsters was overseeing the systematic destruction of the lives of cotton mill workers while smuggling and gang wars were becoming increasingly common. In the midst of it all was the police force, trying to maintain law and order.

Bobby Deol stars as Vijay Singh, a police officer dedicated to busting the gangsters, but things go south and he is left broken and bereft of his family and suffers the consequences for his actions professionally as well. As a punishment posting, Vijay Singh is sent as an instructor to the police training centre in Nashik. Instead of bright, eager minds ready to take down the web of crime, he finds cynical young students who are already disillusioned with the force and its function in society.

In an attempt to kindle the spirit of righteous action and inspire them to fight injustice, Vijay Singh tries to stir the back benchers in the system to care about law and order. When five youngsters — Pramod Shukla (Bhupendra Jadawat), Vishnu Varde (Hitesh Bhojraj), Lakshman Jadhav (Ninad Mahajani), Aslam Khan (Sameer Paranjape) and Janardan Surve (Prithvik Pratap) enter the force, they need to navigate the vortex of politics, crime and money on their own terms.

Produced by Red Chillies Entertainment, the film is middling in its exploration of the too-often-seen fight of the righteous against the system. The first half, concentrating on the academy and its wilful students, is much like a campus film, with the back benchers not really caring much about the institution or its rules. This streak makes them ideal for Vijay Singh's training, which, instead of concentrating on the syllabus, teaches them how to survive in the real world.

There are interesting moments, like the ways in which the friends bond together to create a band of brothers rigging the system, or the contrast between the young guns and the old hands in the force, but one wishes there was a more cohesive and threshed out narrative executed with deftness.

Instead, there are predictable plotlines and scenes that too often fail to live up to their staging. A glaring example is the way in which Deol's character is built up with the students making myths about their new instructor. But Vijay Singh's entry and general aura thereafter do not live up to the expectations created. Another example is the choppy chemistry and rifts between the young policemen.

The verbosity does not help either. So much information is thrown at us without it being properly contextualized or explored. We are told that this time in history marked the beginning of the “institutionalized killing of gangsters by the police” in the country. There is also a reference to the encounters in Punjab. But all this is without any examination of encounters and the sheer immorality of the action. The encounters become mere numbers on a chalkboard and, disturbingly, even a source of bravado amongst the policemen.

The plight of the mill workers, the manipulation of the system by politicians and gangsters, the easy way in which the rivalry between gangs is leveraged and much else simply gets mentioned and put away. This is deeply unsatisfactory in a film rooted in real-life incidents and which cinematically conjures up the era with verisimilitude.

The performances, however, stand out. Jadawat, Bhojraj, Mahajani, Paranjape and Pratap bring alive the predicament of the young men, even if they are sadly underused overall. Deol, similarly, nails the frustration and helplessness of his character, who feels utterly powerless in the grind of the well-oiled machinery of the institution, while also playing the stolid, unshakeable moral compass of the film. Annup Sonii is adept in his portrayal of the manipulative politician who remains cool as a cucumber, cleverly manipulating both sides with ease.

One must also mention the commendable production design that brings the era alive. The sepia yellow colour palette carefully set with the double-decker buses, advertisements and radio broadcasts of the time transport us back to the 1980s. There are certainly some clever bits tucked in the film — the use of Vijay Singh's unusual network, the way the police game the system and the bonhomie between the friends, amongst others, and that is perhaps the biggest disappointment in this film. It's like a paint-by-numbers where the elements are all there but the film, frustatingly, fails to bring them together to create a compelling entertainer.

Netflix is now streaming Class Of '83