There is nothing more off-putting than an anxious father trying to thrust his son down our throats. I am not saying Raj Kumar Hirani’s son, who makes his titular debut (no less!) in ‘Pritam and Pedro’, doesn’t have what it takes. But to pitch him with the ever-dependable Arshad Warsi in every scene is not fair to the boy.
I am sure Hirani meant well for the lad. Who wouldn’t want the best for his son? But Warsi proves to be too hot to handle for Vir Hirani. He looks inadequate and unprepared in this undercooked crime thriller, rather cybercrime drama, with no punch or passion, just a series of limp lunges into anecdotal drama, which leave us as unattended by curiosity as a wedding with no planner… or agenda.
This series about a tech-savvy boy and a comp-illiterate cop unfolds like a series of emasculated escapades, each more Hiranian in its happy head-blob than a school play where the principal’s son gets the lead just because.
Warsi struggles with bouts of excessively naïve characterisation. When he is put in-charge of the cybercrime cell as punishment posting, he is shown starting his computer as if it had just been invented. Bidu, Munnabhai MBBS and Arshad Warsi CID (computer illiterate dolt) mein farq hai.
Arshad’s Pedro Gonsalves feels like a dull Goan archetype. He is what he is, so he can solve a series of cybercrimes with his young friend Pritam (who lives with his grandfather and seems to have no life), each more ridiculous than the previous. One episode, about a politician’s kidnapped son, is so preposterous in its whodunit confabulation that it feels like a plotting anomaly. Lamentably, most of the cyber sleuthing is so slothfully scripted, it seems like an online scam.
The attempts to pitch the young debutant Vir Hirani against Arshad Warsi remain largely misbegotten, with the youngster coming across as an over-workshopped novice. And the attempts to write backstories for the characters are so casual and careless, they seem like an afterthought. The habitually dependable Mona Kapoor, playing a grieving mother, gets the rawest deal. She is on the screen for barely some minutes, and only to hear Warsi’s nasty barbs that exemplify the end of a marriage with not a smudge of respect for the woman.
The series opens with a robbery — an interesting way to start on paper — but it soon splutters to the ground with the writing refusing to float freely. It all feels like a set-up with almost no payoff. The direction is attributed to the very talented Avinash Arrun. But there is no substantial evidence of Arun’s ‘Killa’ instinct anywhere in a series that begins with an ATM machine being robbed, and goes quickly bankrupt thereafter.
