This strong sense of realism, and of time and place, colours the film: the patina is ochre-yellow, of the past, and the shootouts on the streets remind you of the 80s Bombay. The performances match up. Deol gets a hero’s entry, and is shaky in a few places, but on the whole manages to pull off his greying lion role, the unflinching moral centre of the film. Smartly surrounding him is a terrific ensemble cast, toplined by Joy Sengupta as DGP Raghav Desai whose scenes with Deol make the latter look good, Vishwajeet Pradhan as a bull-throated instructor at the academy (hear him chew out hapless recruits after their shooting test, and rejoice), and Anup Soni as the politician who knows how to play the game, and who really should be seen in movies more often.Read at source
Class of '83
Class of 83, which is based on a book authored by leading crime journalist Hussain Zaidi, is set in Bombay in the 1980s when the underworld’s stranglehold on the city was becoming hard to break. Dozens of young men rendered jobless as a result of the ongoing mill strike were being lured into joining local gangs, and the nexus between powerful politicians and criminal gang leaders made it hard for the police to weed out the problem. With this as the backdrop, the film follows an ideological cop-turned-trainer who moulds five cadets into encounter specialists. Yanked off the field for doing his job with more integrity than those in power would like him to, upright officer Vijay Singh (Bobby Deol) lands a ‘punishment posting’ as the dean of the Police Training Centre in Nashik. Convinced that the only way to restore order in a flawed system is to fix it from the inside, he handpicks a clutch of bold young officers and trains them to bend the law in service of the greater good. Inspired from real accounts of the city’s first encounter specialists, the film depicts how the officers shrewdly planned and executed hits while staying within the system and following all necessary protocols. But then it quickly slips into a predictable rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative with egos and corruption breaking up the friends, and a last-ditch shot at redemption triggered by their mentor.
- Director
- Atul Sabharwal
- Release
- 21 Aug 2020
- Run time
- 98 min
- Language
- Hindi
Cast & crew
Reviews
Indian-media reviews, grouped by reception.
Mixed
The available source-linked Indian-media review for Class of '83 is mixed.
Best forViewers looking for Hindi cinema.
All 1 review shown
Media & trailers
Source-linked video records attached to this title.
Details
Technical specs
- Release date
- 21 Aug 2020
- Run time
- 98 min
- Language
- Hindi
- Country
- IN
- Director
- Atul Sabharwal
More like this
No related titles in your selected language yet.