Ab Hoga Hisaab Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Ab Hoga Hisaab starts with a compelling premise involving organ trafficking and illegal migration, but its lack of focus, sluggish pacing, and excessive melodrama prevent it from becoming the gripping crime thriller it should have been. While the social issues at its core remain relevant, the execution leaves much to be desired.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Director: Divyanshu Malhotra
Platform: Amazon MX Player
Episodes: 10
Cast: Sanjay Kapoor, Shaheer Sheikh, Mouni Roy, Avinash Mishra, Nimrit Kaur Ahluwalia
Language: Hindi/Punjabi
Within its walls Ab Hoga Hisaab contains a true tense, urgent crime thriller. The concept is good and has some weight – an illegal organ trafficking operation in Punjab, the lure and precarious situation of illegal immigrants seeking Canada as a refuge and two brothers drawn into a world far more harsh than they knew. This is the stuff that with discipline could have been riveting TV. Rather, the show wastes several of its 10 episodes playing off the same best idea, and becomes lost in subplots that no one wanted.
It focuses on the Bobby and Bunty, brothers who become entangled in the fallout of a crime syndicate that sells human organs and makes use of the desperation of those desperate to get out of Punjab and find a better life abroad. That is a terrible premise, and I think it is important to tell the truth about the vulnerability that poverty and desperation brings about to people who are open to this kind of exploitation. The series has a concept of this. In reality it continues to run away from it.
The main hindrances are concentration and focus. The TV series never develops any suspense about the trafficking scheme and the threat posed by the trafficking ring itself, but instead keeps going back to relationship problems and a story that lasts a lot longer than it needs to. But much of the time is consumed by Bobby’s involvement with a character named Gazal, which justifies its presence on screen little. Its central crime story appears to be the main thing that it’s supposed to be about, but it’s always turning back to family drama or melodramatic romance instead, and the tension that should be mounting at every turn becomes diluted among too many layers of other storyline.
After 10 episodes, time’s enemy is the show itself. The story doesn’t give that much material and there’s a lot of padding. There are emotional beats that are reiterated in the episodes, some conversations are repeated several times, seemingly, in slightly different ways, and the big revelations about the main crime story come much too late. It would have been a much more effective, maybe six episode, version of this same story — a tighter, more urgent, less fodder for boring your viewers, version of the story.
The performances certainly don’t help. Mouni Roy and Sanjay Kapoor, who are the two protagonists of this trafficking story, do not make for convincing bad guys. A relaxed aspect to the way they perform that doesn’t always suit this kind of material — it’s an intellectual appreciation that these are supposed to be intimidating, brutal characters, but it’s not very often that you feel those effects. The two brothers, Shaheer Sheikh and Avinash Mishra bring sincerity to their roles but the script doesn’t allow for the conflict between them to be very powerful at the end.
The challenge is that the elements that make a good show are there. Indian OTT content is generally limited and specific — Punjab’s story with illegal migration to Canada is one with social weight that needs to be popularized. If the organ trafficking aspect was done properly, it could have created enough of a scare to make a crime thriller. But the show won’t stray from the easy, familiar ground of family drama to the more interesting, more dangerous ground of establishing real stakes and real menace.
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The urgency of the plot has lessened by the time it now returns to the main crime story of the second half of the season. It would be more interesting to see if a character will get to Canada than it would be to see what happens to the actual bad guy of the show.
Ab Hoga Hisaab had something to share. It was constantly off-topic when it came to telling it.
Ab Hoga Hisaab is now available on Amazon MX Player in Hindi/Punjabi.