After The Break, The Night Manager Returns With A Pointless Part 2

The Night Manager(Disney+ Hotstar)

Rating: ** ½

Sometimes  the  biggest  of strategists can go wrong. The minds that decided to split writer-director Sandeep Modi’ s  The Night Manger into two (messily amputated ) halves , have done the series a huge disservice.

Part 2, as it were,is  a vegan’s delight. All the meat was in Part 1, and even the principal performances were more accentuated by the  predominant emotions  in the  first-half  . The second-half is all about  nemesis.And not  of the subtle variety. There are no new revelations for us to chew on. We know Aditya Roy Kapoor’s  Shaan  Sengupta(is  he Bengali, nothing in his attitude or  conversations suggests any cultural grounding  except a  South Mumbai upbringing) has infiltrated  the  antagonist arms  dealer Shelly Rungta’s organization.

We saw in Part 1 that Shaan won the ruthless Rungta’s trust by staging his son’s kidnapping and  rescue. Miraculously the  little boy disappears  in the second half.Maybe he got kidnapped again,this time for real, and we don’t know  about it.

Part 2, if  we may call it that, is  all about  Shaan “rescuing” the captivating  and captured Kaveri(that must have been  the brief to Sobhita Dhulipala, to act captivating while  being under Rungta’s  control)   from  Rungta’s clutches.

Shaan and  Kaveri keep fucking  right  under Rungta’s nose . The only member of  Rungta’s team who can see through the game is the gay and  volatile  BJ, played with tremendous  fidelity  by Saswata Chatterjee(who should  have played Shaan, and  not only because he is Bengali).

There is an indefinable  poignancy  to  Saswata’s  BJ. He is a man on the brink, waiting to topple off the edge,perhaps happily.The  rest  of  the  cast are all poseurs, charlatans  lost in a masquerade( to borrow the title of a Carpenters’ classic). Smoking-hot  in their appearance the characters swear by the barrel of their  guns, but have little to  say  about their  illegitimate  power except to bully those weaker than them.

On the  other  side there are Tillotama Shome  and the criminally underutilized  Joy Sengupta as RAW agents trying desperately to bring Rungta to book with Shaan’s help. It’s all way too formulaic to do justice  to the original novel  by  John Le Carre who was to espionage  literature  what Anil Kapoor can never be to method acting. His Rungta  is more  a child who wants  every toy in the store than a seriously  sinister enemy of  the nation.

As for Aditya Roy Kapoor, he started with  feeling . But by the end  of it he just looked bored.

As for part  2 of  The Night Manager, it is  more ‘John Le Carre on Jatta’  than the intensely explorative series on the  alliance of power  and  corruption that it had set out to be  in Part 1.