Class of '83 

Cast: Bobby Deol, Anup Soni, Joy Sengupta, Vishwajeet Pradhan, Ninad Mahajani, Bhupendra Jadawat, Sameer Paranjape, Hitesh Bhojraj, Prithvik Pratap and others.

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Director: Atul Sabharwal

Duration: One hour 38 minutes

Where to Watch: Netflix

Critics' Rating: 2 out of 5

Class of '83 story:

Demoted to an academy job, cop trains give foolhardy students as assassins in his risky revenge plot against police corruption and the underworld.

Class of '83 Review:

In the 80s, new cadets are getting trained in Nashik and are awaiting for Dean Vijay Singh (Bobby Deol) to give them lectures during the semester. However, missing him throughout the whole semester, five efficient and twisted cadets become impatient. Their encounter with Dean is unusual which make them his favourites.

Vijay Singh has an emotional past which haunts him. No, it's not just related to his family but also the whole corrupted system which he wishes to clean but no one lets him. Due to this corrupt system, he has been assigned as the Dean in the form of punishment posting. However, those five cops lead him to get reinstated as the officer in charge.

Set in the 80s and the early 90s, when underworld was prominent in Bombay (now Mumbai), Singh finds these five men who can help him clean Bombay which is beyond the underworld lives. The five debutantes are impressive to the core played by Ninad Mahajani, Bhupendra Jadawat, Sameer Paranjape, Hitesh Bhojraj, Prithvik Pratap and they know what they have signed up for. 

They show a ray of hope but gets dissolved in the sparkling corrupt system but is there a way out for that? Well, there has to be. Based on the book by Hussain Zaidi, The Class of 83: The Punishers of Mumbai Police was published recently. The synopsis is quite similar to what we saw in the movie.

It read as "At a time when Mumbai was plagued by underworld gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim, Iqbal Kaskar and Chhota Rajan, the batch of 1983 from the Police Training School (PTC) in Nashik-trained by the legendary Arvind Inamdar-produced a group of prominent encounter specialists who have been credited with bringing back the rule of law in the city."

The villain of the film is not the underworld don 'Kalsekar' who is mentioned throughout but the people involved in corruption be it CM played by Anup Soni or those five recruited cops who think it's fair in their job to be bribed. 

The pace of Class of '83 picks up after it inches towards an hour of the runtime. Yes, the film is only one hour 38 minutes long, but it becomes more interesting (not really) in the last half an hour when they kickstart their on-field job. In just comparison to the whole runtime of the film, only the last half an hour seems to be a saviour.

The hero of the film is indeed those five debutants with Bobby Deol's calming presence does the little talking. He keeps calm even when he has to question wrongdoings of each and every person involved in the system. He is the typical principal of the school. He dons salt-and-pepper look and is a widower.

There are some sequences which show the beauty of the city back in the 80s and will remind you of those dark eras which many of us have just witnessed via movies or read in the books especially by Zaidi. 

The makers have researched well for the film and dug out the book thoroughly for the perfect entertainment. But still, it felt like 'work in progress'. 

Director Atul Sabharwal had helmed Arjun Kapoor starrer Aurangazeb back in 2013 which was also a cop drama. So this investigative cop drama seems to be his forte. But for this he rushed in some sequences, not giving right breakpoints making the sequence change entirely. 

As a producer for Netflix Original, Shah Rukh Khan didn't seem to have a great run with Bard of the Blood and Betaal (both shows). This is his first movie outing as the producer for the streaming platform which is on its way to the add-on factor.

Overall, if you can invest one hour 38 minutes it might look prolonged and dud too. Time-saving runtime sadly couldn't save this Class of '83.