Murder Mistry…A Tame Lame Version Of The Original

Rating: **

Mistry,  a  Jio HotStar series  in the news  for all  the wrong reasons,is a pale  shadow of the original  American series Monk  about a detective Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub)  with obsessive–compulsive disorder. Given an Indian context, the series,  more than its protagonist , suffers  from some sort of   a  disorder.

  The  trick of making the  quirky detective work is to  not allow him to take  himself serious, This,Tony  Shalhoub  achieved   with  minimum strenuousness in the original.Monk in Mistry transforms into Armaan Mistry.As played by  Ram Kapoor,he seems to be on a vague  romp with no  particular agenda  except to be weird and wise,  and  more capable  of solving each case than the  cop on duty  Sehmat Siddiqui(Mona Singh) .

Sehmat seems  constantly stressed. Is  it the pointlessness  of the  whole exercise  which bothers her? The cases that Armaan and Sehmat, in that  order, solve, are neither exciting nor rewarding . God Dammit,  they  are  not even  worth our  while.

Nothing here that  gives us ‘goosedumps’(as Sehmat’s assistant, one of those typically bullish  cops who need to be constantly restrained, calls them) .As far as murder mysteries go(don’t think Agatha Christie) these  cases  don’t need investigation, they need  a  hurried closure  and  a quick burial. They define  “cold case” with a freezing impact.

 Everything feels frozen  and sterile in Mistry, least of all the  dead bodies which seem more live than the  busybody characters who define pointless lassitude.

 There are an assorted  number of cases  to be solved, and  Armaan’s assistant Sharanya(Shikha  Talsania) behaves  as if she would  rather be anywhere else  than at  the  scene  of  the crime with her  boss who   acts as though he has seen Shah  Rukh Khan in  My Name Is Khan on a loop and has come away  impressed.

  Director  Rishabh  Seth allows Ram Kapoor no room to  innovate or even move  an  inch away from the  original version. Resultantly  the character  seems stilted and frozen. We gather Armaan Mistry has  gone through  a  rough  past.  But do past traumas cause OCD?  Or  is this a fake medical prognosis to go with the  rest of the show?

I watched three of the cases one after another, and then gave up. Nothing here to set the mind rocking  and  rolling.The first  case is  about a  politician,  his sassy intimidating  wife and a  suave killer.The revelation at the  end is so lame it feels like  a joke. The second  “mystery”  about  a  psychic named  woman named Dolly Futurewala(how illustrative!)  is  even duller. The  third story about a cop who unintentionally  kills  an informer is  slightly  less sluggish than the  first two case studies which  feel like amateur detective classes at  a primary school. Season 2 of  Mistry ? No can do.