Rating : 2.5/5
Genre : Crime Drama
Year : 2020
Running time : 1 hours 38 minutes
Director : Atul Sabharwal
Cast : Bobby Deol, Viswajeet Pradhan, Anup Soni, Sameer Pranjape
Kid ratingfollow : PG-15
Podcast Review : Here
Friends were texting me links to the trailer of “Class of ’83” so I had high hopes. Yeah, well, hopes dashed. In short: look elsewhere for your next big watch.
The film is based on a book by crime journalist Hussain Zaidi. Zaidi also wrote the book that Anurag Kashyap’s “Black Friday” was based on. Class of ’83 is set in the 80s and is about the rise of powerful gangsters who have the government bureaucrats in their pocket, rendering the police powerless.
Honest police office Vijay Singh (Bobby Deol, whom I last saw in the nauseatingly average Apne) runs afoul of one such corrupt politician, and is sent on a punishment posting as Dean of the police academy. Once there, he trains a handpicked bunch of officers to “encounter” (kill) gangsters by using legal loopholes and covering their tracks. When the five graduate, they are ready to take on the criminals.
The story looks decently interesting, but the film can’t capitalize on its potential. The first half of the film is spent on Dean Vijay Singh and his academy. We get to see the bonding between the five, but the proceedings are so lackluster that I had difficulty drumming up any interest. Towards the second half the film tries to show us the corrupting influence of the outside world on these 5, but it loses the plot.
The Dean’s character is badly fleshed out and Bobby Deol’s poor acting doesn’t help. The actors playing the five aren’t charismatic to hold interest, although they weren’t bad actors. This kind of police procedural needed a strong screenplay and firm direction. Since both were absent, the later half of the film got kinda muddled.
The film is supposed to have its moment of redemption, after which the good guys get their revenge, but the film can’t make it impactful. I did like the fact that some scenes had a “narrator” – one of the 5 recruits, Aslam Khan, who fills in some of the gaps in the story. The movie also tries to be realistic in some scenes but then completely undermines that effort by making the dialogues filmi and cliched.
All things considered, Class of 83 does not work because we can’t root for any of these policemen or the work they do. The film ends up good in a few sequences but mostly patchy and boring. I’m going to blame director Sabharwal (he also directed Aurangzeb) for this one, although his lead actor didn’t help much.
Kidwise: Violence, sexual allusions. Subject matter is inherently kid-unfriendly.
