Rana Naidu Season 2 Review: Rana Daggubati's Show Blows Hot And Cold
Absolutely nothing in the murky world of Rana Naidu is played with a straight bat, but Season 2 of the crime drama series adapted for India by Karan Anshuman (think an admixture of his Inside Edge and Mirzapur), rustles up a piquant alchemy of crime and cricket although it is low blows and upper cuts in a shady fight club that it kicks off with.
The principal antagonist, Mumbai gangster Rauf Mirza (Arjun Rampal), uses a cricket bat to batter his foes. He declares that the straight drive is his favourite stroke. That, as it transpires, does not prove to be enough for him – and Rana Naidu Season 2 – to hit the ball out of the park.
That is not all the cricket that there is in the show. Alia Oberoi (Kriti Kharbanda in her web debut), only daughter of unscrupulous movie studio owner Viraj Oberoi (Rajat Kapoor), sets out to buy a fictional T20 cricket team. Her brother, Chirag (Tanuj Virwani), stands in her way.
The gentleman's game is, however, only of peripheral significance. It serves to tangentially underscore the gender-skewed dynamics of a wealthy business family and 'expose' (for whatever it is worth) the seamier side of franchise cricket (as Inside Edge did at length).
Politics, too, is accorded the same sort of oblique and perfunctory treatment in Rana Naidu Season 2, directed by Anshuman, Suparn S Varma and Abhay Chopra. An electoral rivalry takes shape between a self-serving neta and a dreaded mafia don, but the contest and its repercussions are mere detours to be glossed over.
The gangster, with a fiercely loyal vote bank, uses the smarmy politician (Rajesh Jais) – the one that the show's protagonist owed allegiance to in Season 1 – to get him out of prison. He promptly sets himself up as the benefactor's political opponent. The poll battle never comes to pass.
The movie and music industries, too, find their way into the action-packed but inert narrative set in a dog-eat-dog world. But like so much else in the show, they only hover in the background.
Rana Naidu Season 2 piles cliché upon tattered cliché. The brooding anti-hero, played with sustained intensity by Rana Daggubati, resolves to put his past behind him, secure the future of his family and drag himself out of the quagmire of hatchet jobs that he hitherto undertook for scandal-hit celebrity clients.
'One last job' that he agrees to accept triggers a full-fledged battle. His adversaries include the crime lord and the movie mogul. Neither is easy to tame and Rana isn't one to shy away from a bust-up.
Firearms, hammers, all manner of projectiles and foul language are freely used as these men slug it out. A 'Sultan's sword' has pride of place under Viraj Oberoi's portrait in the tycoon's living room. Once the audience is made aware of the scimitar early in the show, it is easy to guess that the prized possession is destined for a larger role.
Violence escalates, the emotional stakes rise as domestic strife is aggravated by the appearance of a divorced man, Naveen (Dino Morea), in the life of Rana's wife Naina (Surveen Chawla), and his ties with his brothers, Tej (Sushant Singh) and Jaffa (Abhishek Banerjee), are pushed to snapping point.
And, not to forget, there is Rana's pesky father Naga Naidu (Venkatesh Daggubati). He is in debt and danger. He owes money to Anjali (Heeba Shah), the queen of a scrapyard. She threatens to kill the errant man if he does not pay up. Naga Naidu scrambles to save his skin. His son is in no mood to help out.
The payoffs from these emotional conflicts and physical confrontations never feel adequate. The twists and turns play out in a largely arbitrary manner, leaving gaps that prove hard to plug.
The flare-ups occur in order to take the 'story' forward rather than help ground the key players and their impulses in relatable contexts. Even when the clashes (or negotiations) are between Rana and his family or between Viraj Oberoi and his two warring children, they do not hit home hard enough.
That is not to say that the writing team of Karan Anshuman, Karmanya Ahuja, Ananya Mody, Ryan Soares and Karan Gour is completely out of its depth. The eight episodes aren't devoid of passages that work. If only there were more, the show might have achieved a firmer balance between the visceral and the emotive, between the over-the-top and the routine.
The principal characters progress from where they left. The issues festering between Rana and Naina come to a head. The latter gives Rana an ultimatum, 'I don't think I can live like this anymore.' The husband promises to mend his ways. That is easier said than done.
Tej, a former stuntman dealing with the onset of Parkinson's, finds love. He dreams of a happy life with Ana (Ishita Arun). The youngest of the Naidu siblings, Jaffa, also falls in love. Tasneem (Aditi Shetty), a go-getting girl in Tej's film stunts agency, is just the partner that the scarred boy needs.
Rauf has his own 'family' – his gang members and supporters – to stand up for. He seeks to avenge the killing of a trusted aide. Rana vows to keep his children out of harm's way. His daughter Nitya (Afrah Sayed) witnesses a brutal double murder that lands her in trouble.
Rana Daggubati as the brooding, inscrutable 'fixer for the stars' who is now more focussed than ever before on fixing his personal problems and doing the 'daddy things' he was deprived of, fleshes out conflicted family man of action to perfection.
Venkatesh Daggubati sails through his role without breaking a sweat. As evil personified, Arjun Rampal finds, with a bit of help from the script, the human core of a man with almost no redeeming features.
Unlike in Season 1, the women here have some elbow room. Surveen Chawla as a troubled wife who gives no quarters, Kriti Kharbanda as an entrepreneur who holds her own in a world that her father and brother want to shut her out of, Afrah Sayed as a girl traumatised by bloodshed and Aditi Shetty as Jaffa's steely girlfriend, make an impact in what is otherwise a lopsidedly male universe.
For all that is going for it, Rana Naidu Season 2 is a letdown. It blows hot and cold. The performances and the plot sleights might have added up to much more than they eventually do had the show not been as inconsistent. Its flurry of punches delivers more sound than sting.
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