The much-awaited series of Red Chillies Entertainment and Netflix association ‘Bard of Blood’ is finally streaming online and all we have is one question “Why?”.
A series of seven episodes revolves around the story of a retired intelligence officer Kabir Anand.
The series opens with the shooting sounds from a warzone and Kabir Anand played by Bollywood actor Emraan Hashmi, waking up from his sleep, distressed. Kabir is a guy who lost his best friend on a mission. He is stuck in the past and is not ready to move on, giving up his career as an excellent spy.
It’s a general story around an Intelligence Agency, where the current working officers are not able to cope up with the new challenges and have to call the prodigal officer who somehow retaliates in the beginning but later the emotions of patriotism and vengeance take over him bringing him back in the field.
A very typical tale based on exposing the future plan of a terrorist group based in the Balochistan area and rescuing four Indian agents captured by them. It also stars ‘Made in Heaven’ fame Shobita Dhulipala. The series tries to show a woman officer working in the Intelligence Bureau and despite immense talent, faces sexism from the higher officials. On top of that nowhere in the series any female characters are highlighted and all of them look very dependent on their male counterparts.
The series has many other flaws. No one paid attention to cinematography. While many scenes look forced, the higher officials are seen making puny mistakes and giving out the information to the rivals, easily. There is also a mole in the Intelligence Department for the past many years whom no one could catch and suddenly we felt he was the only person doing his job properly as an infiltrator.
Well, we all have watched the promotional video of the ‘Bard of Blood’ where Shahrukh Khan tries to be funny and Emraan Hashmi has a dead look to Shahrukh’s act. After watching the series we had the same look and we regretted that we should have assumed the outcomes through the promotional video only.
The worst part is the investigation scene of Emraan Hashmi post the murder of Sadiq Sheikh played by Rajit Kapoor where the Investigating officer could not do justice to his role. At one moment he is seen forcing himself to utter a dialogue while in another he goes too casual and just blabbers in a tone which is dead to the ears without any modulation.
Even though the situation is quite grave, all the officers appear to be very relaxed and the whole burden of reaching the roots of the conspiracies is on one man.
This Netflix Original gives us the total opposite feel compared to ‘Sacred Games’, while the latter built up the story and grabbed the attention of the audience from the very beginning, ‘Bard of Blood’ fails to do that throughout its run time. A poor storyline with poor dialogue delivery and critically acclaimed actors performing average on the screen added up to create this disaster which nowhere comes close to any good thriller show.
We would give it two out of five stars for titling each episode using Shakespearean act names from his various plays.
You can watch the trailer here:
