Mirzapur Season 3 Keeps The Franchise Fans Happy

Rating: ****

It’s all back in black, more pickled and snazzy than before.The third season of Mirzapur  takes us over that bumpy murderous road which we have travelled before.  There are no surprises this time. But director Gurmeet Singh quickly sets the tilt right when the  pace threatens  to slacken. Laden with bestial violence and lurid subplots, with characters who swear revenge like junkies snorting cocaine, Mirzapur is the pulp equivalent of an over-the-hill whore powdering her nose and puffing up her chest to look younger than she actually is.But it is  nonetheless a brutal  if brittle  but enjoyable  revisitation  of  the badlands .

The characters, sans the  volatile Munna,  are still doing the same things that they were in the last and well-received seasons of Mirzapur. But a lot more of it. And a lot less confidently. Pumping bullets into anyone who crosses their way. It could be someone overtaking the car of one of the self-appointed baahubali of the area or someone fornicating with one of their wives…the price is the same for all crimes.

The language this time in Mirzapur is far less picturesque  and graphic . The content and mood remain predominantly unstoppable.  Everyone  wants to grab  a  piece   of  the  unconstitutional siyaasat. Every character   is incurably corrupt and bloodthirsty, barring a  lawyer Ramakant Pandit(Rajesh Tailang, excellent) who  remains  a paragon of virtue in a country  of badasses.

Tailang’s  Ramakant chooses to go to jail when all the deviants of  plunderland offer to  bail him out. Instead of taking the offer as any sensible  man would do, Ramakant rots in  jail and  bears  terror attacks and taunts like, “Nanga hoja, dekhe tumhara kitna  lamba hai.”

Cheesy, yeah. But that is the way  the  cookie crumbles in  this part of  the world.

There is a  routine kind of  raunchiness in Mirzapur .Characters curse, abuse, release  bodily fluids anywhere  they fancy, including people’s faces. If you  recall the  first season there was  the scandalous Beena  Tripathi(Rasika Dugal) who gets impregnated  by the househelp.

Unrepentant,  Beena  had declared about her impregnator, “He  does it(the sex act) for such a long duration!” Househelp is sure a help.

Yes, I remember your words Beenaji. Scandal sticks.Mirzapur thrives on  shock value. At one  point during a street fight in Season 3, a man’s head is severed on camera: none of that discreet  turning away.That’s for the ninnys This is no place for the  squeamish. Hurling  into  the  violence  of rural Uttar Pradesh, Mirzapur shows  us a world completely liberated of  the law.

There is  a paunchy ineffectual cop (Manu Rishi) who  is like  a band-aid on a gaping wound.Pankaj Tripathi’s Kaleen  Bhaiyya  remains  largely under the weather.  He has  little  to do  except moan in pain and  make ineffectual protest noises. This character has clearly had  its day.

Shweta Tripathi’s Golu and  Ali Fazal’s  Guddu are all over the place, building for themselves  the kind of coarse karma that can  only take them one way. Strangely Golu , after  strutting around  in denim  jeans and her intimidating swag (she remains unfazed even when at one  point, a  sleazy  politician  threatens to rape her) she  disappears . Officially  she  is ‘kidnapped’ and  Guddu goes berserk in trying to  find her.

  Ali  Fazal gnashes his teeth so hard,  you fear for his jaw.There  is too much of  him and Shweta  Tripathi , too little of  Rasika Dugal,  Pankaj Tripathi, and Ishita Talwar who is  as  convincing as a chief minister  as Rakhi Sawant would be as Joan Of Arc.

The  most  interesting character this season  is Bharat Tyagi (Anjum Sharma) who  stays sinister  without resorting to paan masala uncouthness.  Quite often we don’t know what Bharat is up to.We even see him flirting discreetly with the aforementioned  Madame CM . I suspect the show’s  writers are still figuring out what to do with Bharat next.

Munna is  much missed, though.Probably because Divyendu was the best actor  in the series.