The Samit Kakkad directorial Dharavi Bank serves all glitters. The 10 episodes series roughly enveloped in 40 minutes to 1 hour is an incremental unveiling. The series doesn’t allow you to infer characters but it does let you infer their actions. With chunks of vigour, mad hunt and mano a mano amongst the sturdy complicated characters, the show definitely earns brownie points.
Suniel Shetty brings life to Thalaivan, the crime kingpin with 30,000 crores in business. While everything about Thalaivan was truly a head knock, his makeover and the grotesque eyebrows help him to elevate more.
Vivek Oberoi carries JCP Jayant Gavaskar, who embarks on a harrowing ‘man hunt’ throughout the series. Sonali Kulkarni, the CM of Maharashtra, Janvi Surve, intends Suniel Shetty, aka Thalaivan, to be annihilated from the town for political reasons, and JCP Jayant is her brainer.
The series also stars Luke Kenny, Freddy Daruwala, Shanthi Priya, Santosh Juvekar, Nagesh Bhosle, Siddharth Menon, Hitesh Bhojraj, Rohit Pathak, Jaywant Wadkar, Chinmay Mandlekar, Bhavana Rao, and the director Samit Kakkad in climactic roles.
The trailer promised a ‘galvanizing jolt’, as we mentioned earlier and thanks to Suniel Shetty and Vivek Oberoi who prospered to bring justice to that, but after watching the series of 10 episodes, we do smell a wishy-washy script. That definitely managed to propel the crime drama glam all throughout, but couldn’t assist the characters to glow within. Had it not been for the intriguing cast, amazing direction, cinematography and setting, Dharavi would have been a bland watch.
Fair to say, Suniel Shetty who marked his OTT debut and Vivek Oberoi turned out to be the saviour.
For the last catch, the show stands firm on its setting and backdrop. Sprawling inside ‘Dharavi’ Asia’s largest slum, with noisy narratives and gripping background music, the show lets go of all of the gangster enervation. The show is a watchable one, with a dilemmatic aftermath but also with a clutching ambitious ending.
IWMBuzz rates it 3 stars.