04 September,2020 08:00 AM IST | Mumbai | Vinamra Mathur
A still from the show, JL 50, Picture Courtesy: YouTube
Writer and director Shailender Vyas' JL 50 flirts with some ambitious ideas, at least for the world of OTT, the new superstar in India. Branching away from the bandwagon of crime shows, JL 50 attempts a space that we have sensed and seen in films in India and abroad. Within the first 15 minutes, the plot is set and the main characters are introduced, all that needs to be done is get the narrative going. It does, and it doesn't.
The opening montage is followed by a news clipping that flight AO 26 has mysteriously gone missing, but we already know the story isn't going to be about this aircraft, since the title suggests another flight number. And boom, the next moment, we are told flight JL 50 has crashed near the hills in Kolkata. What's perplexing here is that the flight took off 35 years ago!
The premise is juicy and the cast is solid. Abhay Deol, Pankaj Kapur, Rajesh Sharma and Piyush Mishra headline the series, but that's sadly a mere half the battle won. It's not appalling but also disappointing to see an exciting story and an effective ensemble blend so blandly. Mishra is particularly a tricky actor to work with, and not too many have successfully extracted his eccentricity and made him explode. Here, he gives needless odes to Manoj Bajpayee from Aks and Nawazuddin Siddiqui from Kick, breaking into hysterical laughs with the idea of creating menace. It does create a room for ham though, with a little bit of cheese.
Sharma is barely there to register his character, let alone his performance. He's a CBI Officer, more erratic than efficient, and to add unnecessary laughs. Most of the humour actually unfolds during their investigations, with their silliness. A dour Deol then has to pretend to be the only man concerned with solving this puzzling case. Ritika Anand, one of the producers of the show who's also one of the only two survivors of the crash, does the opposite. She has to pretend to look surprised, not ready to believe she has woken up in 2019. The complexity is more comical than chilling.
What does work, albeit partially, is the makers' audacity to infuse the story with some historical references, thankfully not mythological, to justify how the unfortunate and unimaginable event unfolded. Kapur has a monologue about physics and time and Deol's smiling throughout his speech, almost smirking at his story's implausibility. Sadly, that could be my reaction too, not to Kapur but to this show.
Unlike Kahaani, where Kolkata became one of the integral characters as the story proceeded, JL 50 does nothing for the city and its gorgeousness. The landscape is hijacked (no pun intended) by the underwhelming performances on display. A thriller with this juicy premise should have flown to great skies, but JL 50 sadly fails to take off.
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