Netflix’s Guns & Gulaabs Review: Rajkummar Rao shines in a mediocre Raj & DK series

Language: Hindi

Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Dulquer Salmaan, Adarsh Gourav, Gulshan Devaiah, Satish Kaushik

I always believe to have a show on the digital platform, increases the expectation of the audiences who has an understanding of cinema. We are not ready to take anything and everything that you give us -be it your mindless dhushum dhushum or silly romance. We need matter that is engaging. The storytelling is confusing and lacks depth. And the women actors in the show were not given enough time on screen and their parts were near to negligible. It is a fine celebration of pulp fiction, but the storyline somehow massacres the fun.

In Guns & Gulaabs, Rajkummar Rao plays a mechanic who is a good-hearted simple soul and wants to run away from the clutches of his mafia father. The movie starts with the murder of his father. He doesn’t feel like crying because he never respected or loved his father. He struggles to be different from his late father. His expressions are classic and he has this massive talent of getting into the skin of the character.

On the other hand, we have Adaresh Gourav, is an immature man who is in hurry to prove the world that he is the next big drug mafia like his father. He doesn’t understand business and at the same time he doesn’t know how to develop relationship with his own people and the police. Too full of himself, he ends up having clashes with his own people who doesn’t take him seriously. The dialogues are witty, but the story is directionless and not so engaging. One episode after another, you just wait for the story to build up, but it fails massively. The seven-episode series is just too stretched.

But, the best part of Guns & Gulaabs is when the story keeps shifting on and off to the teenage love story in school experiencing their first love, heart breaks. It brings back childhood memories of school days when we all used to play FLAMES. Another positive of the series is creating an era, we all yearn to go back to i.e. the pre-internet era of love letters. I believe that was the golden era, when we never felt the need to be connected with our families, friends or even lovers all the time. And that is the magic of nostalgia which the series was able to re-create. Had the makers concentrated more on that rather than the killing and shooting mindlessly, I think it would have been a much better series.

Rating: 2 and half out of 5