Shoorveer review: Underwhelming series is behind its time

In a scene from Disney+Hotstar’s Shoorveer, a spy who has infiltrated one of India’s most covert, secretive defence institutions tells his handler based in Pakistan about having successfully duplicated his boss’ phone. “Pistol jail mein aa chukka hai,” he says, pretending to use a secret code. You can tell a series yearning to be about modern warfare and border defences has taken its inspiration from pop-culture tropisms when someone uses the world ‘pistol’ even in a secret code. Shoorveer is a middling, often bafflingly inept series about a select team of soldiers from each of India’s three defence forces. Insipid, poorly-acted, and hastily put together Shoorveer doesn’t even quite have the swagger or a series stealing performance the kind KK Menon put in for the platform’s unlikely success story, Special Ops, either. What it does have is lots of macho posturing and clinical cockiness, that makes it seem behind its time.

Sea Hawks, a once popular show on DD Metro (should you be old enough to have caught the thing) was a brave attempt at world building in a domain that by default requires vision and scale. Espionage is easier because there you can focus on people and their stories. Here, you’ll have to show battles and the perverse pleasures of watching things explode etc. Shoorveer is about a special unit, one that India puts together as a fairly simple fix to its first responder’s problem. It’s too simplistic, to combine the army, navy and the air force into one unit, but here it is argued off within minutes. “What will be the chain of command sir?” a soldier asks, to which his superior responds with “Depends on the mission”.

Shoorveer features some familiar faces, not in the least a greying but immaculate looking Makarand Deshpande. Deshpande plays NSA chief Milind Phandse who believes “Red Tape Chokes India”.  It’s his suggestion to build this new elite unit that will comprise of the best the three defence forces have to offer. It’s perhaps a national mystery how Deshpande has been under-utilised in the OTT era as of yet. But here though mysteriously magnetic, he is undermined by the material. He ponderously delivers his lines, often with the brutality of a man who knows it all, but the words that often come out are so poorly conceived they make him look anything but authoritative. Perhaps the one actor who readily fills his boots here is the man who joins Phandse in the den, Manish Chaudhuri as the forthright leader of this new elite unit. Chaudhuri plays wide-chested, pompous men with élan and here it’s a short, but nifty little shift in gears to play the general commanding a wayward bunch of rookies who though they have the spark, don’t always have the discipline.

Then there are the young bunch, forgettable actors who tried to play their bits but are short-changed by just how lean the material is. It’s incredible that even after two decades, writing hasn’t evolved to a point where pilots aren’t just bullish jocks and the army isn’t just the toneless muscle. Every time someone has stepped out in the Indian sun to do a short-term series on the defence forces they are faced with one clear adversary. No it’s not villains, of which there are decent though familiar ones here, but the question of scale and authenticity. Shoorveer would have always been judged on how accurately it can depict flying, air combat, action sequences that would really be the pulse of the series. It’s evident from how Shoorveer looks and feels that even with OTT, we are no closer to solving that puzzle.

Some of the in-flight action is decent, but when it comes to showcasing the magnanimity of jet planes swooshing past each other, there isn’t much to see as much as there is to hear. The voices of the pilots try to fill in a strictly technical vacuum but declarations of ‘I got you’, ‘let’s see what you’ve got’ or ‘not so soon’ feel dated in a world where we can possibly expect better. The frivolously animated sequences, some gimmicky looking cockpit cutlery and some truly underwhelming CGI, make you wonder if a show about the defence forces ought to have been so aspirational as to dig its own perpendicular grave.

The problem is that a good series finds ways of making the lack of action or scale, palatable, almost infectious. Both Special Ops and Prime Video’s The Family Man have now done it over the span of multiple seasons. Primarily because they are led by fine actors and supported by some terrific material in the letter of the word. Here there is nothing, not a crutch, nor a sling to help clueless actors waltz past what was already a really low bar. Instead, Shoorveer dives at full tilt with no form of rescue in sight. It’s really an opportunity missed.

The author writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Views expressed are personal.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,
India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram