“O Captain! My Captain!” — well, not quite, but almost.

This line from Walt Whitman’s poem, made memorable by cult and critical favourite Dead Poets Society could’ve made its way naturally into one of many scenes in Class of ’83 — a Netflix release, starring a bunch of relatively newbie actors (Hitesh Bhojraj, Sameer Paranjape and Bhupendra Jadawat, Ninad Mahajani), with Bobby Deol playing a stand-in for Robin Williams’ unorthodox teacher.

That is, if Williams was a tough-as-nails, uncorrupt cop doggedly trying to nab one big-shot criminal because his wife (Ahmareen Anjum)… succumbed to an unnamed illness?!?

No need to re-read and re-process the last sentence. The logic propelling this kill-all-gangsters-actioner doesn’t make sense.

In 1981, Vijay Singh’s (Deol) wife was about to undergo surgery. They, and their college-going son, knew that she might not survive the procedure. The wife, however, told Vijay to go pursue a dastardly criminal, and that she would not take no for an answer, because, well, “At home, [she’s] the boss.”

In Class of ’83, neither the logic of Bobby Deol’s actions nor the motivations of his pupils make any sense

She and a lot of good policemen die in the film — one succumbing in the operation theatre, the others riddled by gunfire. The local politician (Anup Soni) is the obvious snitch — one whom Vijay promptly confronts, and who, just as promptly “promotes” Vijay as the dean of a police academy.

Grunting out his lines and skipping lectures — the students wondering if the legendary gangster-killing cop will actually teach them a subject or two — Vijay eventually shortlists five bright, academically non-conformist students, and sharpens them up as his personal hit squad.

By 1984, the young police graduates, posted all over Bombay, unite when they spot their teacher’s sworn enemy in a cab, and take him out in a perfectly planned hit in the guise of a by-the-book shoot-out. The friends soon become celebrity cops, hunting down gangsters while their teacher, who is still the dean at the academy, and with whom they have had no contact since their graduation, collects their newspaper clippings.

The screenplay by Abhijeet Deshpande (Wazir) exists in a simple-minded world where the valorisation of do-gooder cops is blindly celebrated. There’s no escaping that blatant, unblemished, overpowering point of view. The near-sightedness is a narrative impediment, especially when the screenplay shunts eye-opening moments for our cop-heroes later in the story.

Nevertheless, Class of ’83 is a taut thriller with an enigmatic, ear-catching techno-pop score from the era, and there’s no denying that director Atul Sabharwal (Aurangzeb) gives Deol the chance to score a career-best performance as the stern, beefed-up cop with layers of emotional turmoil, who is dramatically half-lit by his cinematographer Mario Poljac (the palette and the technique seem to come naturally to Poljac, a native Norwegian).

Still, the logic of Deol’s actions, nor the motivations of his pupils make sense. Now and then it was as if the entire tale — an adaption of Hussain Zaidi’s book The Class of 83: The Punishers of Mumbai Police — was a make-shift concoction of uncreative set-ups from the screenwriter.

It’s not all bad though. Engaging performances, brief early moments of character explorations, fittingly chosen camera angles and lens/frame choices elevate the story’s clichéd lows. The pluses, however, can’t help the uninteresting climatic action sequence (one of two or three in the film) or the abrupt ending that felt as if the film was hacked-off in the edit-room.

Without moments of tension, nor scenes where the audience genuinely felt intimacy for the characters, the rushed, almost vignette-ish storytelling preference leaves one with a bad case of head-scratches. At times, even so many goods still don’t make a right.

Ruling the roost at the top-ten spot on Netflix, Class of ‘83 is rated appropriate for 16 years and over for one unnecessary scene of a man’s self-gratification in an open police toilet (what are filmmakers thinking at times?!).

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 30th, 2020