Inspector Zende

But what happens later is what hampers what could have been a rather fun watch. With elements that have the potential to be the most hilarious film, Inspector Zende chooses the route of being nothing more than mediocre. These cracks are visible when the main gang is phenomenal at their job but the world built around them is not strong enough to hold their art together. Imagine one of the police officers calculating the expenditure of the operation during the mission itself while wearing a lungi. Or the DGP (Sachin Khedekar) conducting a secret meeting for an undercover mission in a Mumbai chawl, where these men sit in a modest household and not around a glass table in a well-decorated AC conference room.

On the face of it, Manoj Bajpayee as Zende (pronounced with an h, as in Zhende, as he keeps telling people) and Jim Sarbh as the snaky Carl Bhojraj — yes, this is the kind of film where every other name is the real one except the antagonist’s, for reasons best known to the creators — should have been a perfect match. But the attempt at a serio-comic tone falls flat with only an occasional leap or two, with the writing struggling to match the audacity of the criminal and the enterprise of his nemesis.