Midway through Indian Police Force, a fight breaks out inside a Goa warehouse. Two cops, played by Sidharth Malhotra and Shilpa Shetty, rain down kicks and knocks on a gang of goons. The camera darts around frantically, mimicking the handheld grittiness of indie action flicks. The scene is competently executed but feels overlong, unimaginative. It’s all very business-like. After a while, the action spills onto a boat leaving the shoreline. It’s at this point that I began to desperately wish for a Ranveer Singh cameo.
Director Rohit Shetty is frequently mocked for his car-go-boom aesthetics and silly comedy. Yet trim away these frills and what is left is a humourless hull of mediocre action. Streaming on Prime Video and co-directed with Sushwanth Prakash, Indian Police Force is the latest pit stop in Shetty’s ongoing cop universe. It represents, after many years, a genuine desire in the filmmaker to reach out to a different audience: fans of Special OPS and Khakee: The Bihar Chapter, the kind of public that prefers some leanness and realism in their conservative action spectacles. There is a fat-free efficiency to IPF that is its most curious — and numbing — element. “Club me with Singham, Simmba, Sooryavanshi,” Malhotra crows at one point, and while Shetty grants him his wish, he’s forced to ration the bombast of his whiz-bang features.
A series of bombings has shaken up India, all claimed by a single terrorist outfit: the Indian Mujahideen. The latest of these attacks takes place in Delhi, on the Delhi Police’s Raising Day: an “open challenge”. Kabir (Malhotra), a top officer in the special cell unit, and Vikram (Vivek Oberoi), his senior, are tasked to weed out the bombers. Both are upstanding men of honour committed to their job: Kabir has been recently widowed; Vikram’s wife and son barely exert an impression. On the hunt of a mysterious bespectacled mastermind — finely played by Mayank Tandon — the duo is joined by Tara (Shilpa Shetty), a sassy toughie from the Gujarat ATS.
Indian Police Force (Hindi)
Kabir is, in case you’re wondering, the first Muslim protagonist in the Cop Universe. His identity isn’t some liberal-minded gesture towards representation; if that were the case, Shetty and his writers would dwell more on his life journey, or how Muslim officers navigate the Delhi force (something that Paatal Lok showed). Rather, he’s meant as a patriotic counter to all those misguided young boys who bomb hospitals and public places, fixated on their ‘Manzil’ and ‘Maqsad’. Kabir exclusively brings up his religion to chastise those who err in its name; his personal religiosity, if it matters to him, never comes into view. Towards the end, the series attempts to delineate how radicalism takes hold in impressionable minds. Yet it does so in vague, generic terms, unwilling to countenance the political faultlines that often fuel extremism in this country.
It’s amazing how far, and for how long, Shetty has managed to peddle his wares. While most filmmakers these days are busy extolling the virtues of the army — even Sriram Raghavan’s next, Ikkis, is a war film — Shetty has persevered as a steadfast mascot of the nation’s police forces. It doesn’t matter if the setting is Goa, Mumbai, Delhi or Darbhanga; the cops in Shetty’s universe work in arthropoidal unison, unbothered by triflings like jurisdiction or chain of command. Protocols are meant to be broken—”let’s get those bastards,” everyone growls. The Delhi Police took a heavy knock to its reputation after the 2020 riots; it never occurs to Shetty, or even to research consultant Hussain Zaidi, to work it into the plot.
After playing a patriotic soldier in Shershaah and a patriotic spy in Mission Majnu, Siddharth Malhotra rounds out his CV with Indian Police Force. He strains at playing broad: in a scene where Kabir has to stand by and let Tara interrogate a terrorist, Malhotra runs through a range of tough-guy expressions, as though to simply hang back is a crime. Nevertheless, there is a decency in Malhotra that’s refreshing for a Rohit Shetty protagonist. Both Vivek Oberoi and Shilpa Shetty leave an impression, and it’s touching to see Mukesh Rishi, a quarter century since Sarfarosh, still plugging away at his beat. Inspector Salim, after all, did not hang up his boots.
Indian Police Force is currently streaming on Prime Video
