Matka King: A Disappointing Tale

Returning from a long hiatus... will that still be called a hiatus or was that a break or a sabbatical?.. Let's not worry about it.

Happened to watch "Matka King" on Amazon Prime over the last few days. The story is based on a known-but-not-so-known person in 60's/70's Mumbai. I have no idea whether the story truly represents the original personality or not, and that is not the point of this blog.

The series started with some catchy sequences and held the audience halfway through, about 4 to 5 episodes. Each one is almost an hour long, and it did hold a good story in those episodes. Brij Bhatti, the lead of the series, portrayed by Vijay Varma, working for Lalji Bhai (Gulshan Grover), decides to separate out and starts his own "honest" business of gambling via Matka. The USP was to be honest all the time. Open the cards in front of the people; in fact, have your players open the cards. This built the trust with the gamblers very quickly.

The story goes about how Brij expands his Matka business from opening cards once to a jackpot combination called "Sangam" and how it supposedly spreads across India. As his small outside-the-mill game grows into a nationwide empire, it is obvious that the political and underworld would take interest in this humongous money. And that is where the story starts becoming dull and eventually fades into a "let me finish it quickly so that I can move on to my next series" feeling.

What I liked the most was the supporting cast. Siddharth Jadhav as Dagadu and Kritika Kamra as Gulrukh were great. Kritika had two jobs: to look fabulous, which she did, and to act, which she did to some extent. Siddharth had only one job—to act—and he did. The changes in Dagadu's character, from stranger to loyal member to disgruntled person, Siddharth has portrayed well.

Gulshan Grover, the OG "Bad Man", is totally wasted in this series. His character "Lalji Bhai" is not villainous enough, and Bad Man was helpless on that front. Sai Tamhankar, as Brij's wife Barakha, had some role to play, but again, as an actor, she is wasted too.

And the lead role—Vijay Varma—many a time I felt either the character itself doesn't show any emotions or Vijay cannot. I couldn't decipher. But bottom line—90% of the time his face was expressionless. So you decide whether Vijay was successful or an utter failure.

One big miscast was Kishor Kadam as Prashant Bapat, CM, MH. IYKYK.

Last but not least—the Journalist TP. It took me a while to recognize the actor, Girish Kulkarni, as TP. He has carried himself well as TP D'Souza. The makeup man had done a fantastic job of putting Girish in TP's character.

Overall impression—not so great, and I will attribute it to the director. The plot doesn't have enough drama; many characters have been introduced, but not developed. e.g., SI Eknath Tumbde (Bharat Jadhav)—he gets some good footage, but the contribution of this character to the storyline is 0. Similarly, Maqsood (Cyrus Sahukar)—he also gets good screen time in the last 2-3 episodes, but that character is also left hanging.

One thing that I definitely noticed are the sets. The story happens in the 60's and 70's, and it definitely is challenging to set that up in the studio. One needs to be detail-oriented in every frame, and I feel the production designer/director have done a fabulous job there.

There are many other series on OTT; this one can be avoided for sure.