Meeruthiya Gangsters: watch Crime Patrol or Savdhaan India instead

Cast: Jaideep Ahlawat, Aakash Dahiya, Vansh Bhardwaj, Shadab Kamal, Chandrachoor Rai, Jatin Sarna, Sanjay Mishra, Mukul Dev, Nushrat Bharucha

Director: Zeishan Quadri

Producers: Prashant Tiwari, Prateek Tiwari, Shoeb Ahmed, Zeishan Quadri, Priyanka Bassi

Director Zeishan Quadri's Meeruthiya Gangsters is nothing that its name doesn't suggest. The film is about six friends Nikhil (Jaideep Ahlawat), Amit (Aakash Dahiya), Gagan (Vansh Bhardwaj), Sunny (Shadab Kamal), Rahul (Chandrachoor Rai) and Sanjeev Foreigner (as he sports golden hair) from Meerut, who commit crimes casually, justifying their characters of gangsters. First they want to bribe a marketing honcho for a job and then they find an easy way to rake in the moolah.

The film is shot Meerut and Noida, giving it a close to reality feel, which can be credited to both Anurag Kashyap's influence and Quadri's directorial potential. However, the major problem lies with the pace of the story. Each scene seems too stretched. In fact, one would rather watch a crime thriller on TV instead!

Throughout the film, the writer tries to establish that the college-going criminals are very casual about taking lives and just when the film has to end, the cops conveniently nab them. We are informed that 'it doesn't matter how smart a criminal is, his actual place is behind bars', something that Bollywood films have shoved down our throats since time immemorial.

Meeruthiya Gangsters poster

The saddest part of the film is the raw deal given to a talent like Sanjay Mishra who plays Sanjay Foreigner's (Jatin Sarna) property dealer mama. Even though he nails it with his comic expressions even when he has no funny one liners, there just isn't even screen space accorded to him. A waste of a brilliant actor indeed.

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However, the director has tried to infuse comedy in some scenes. Sadly, it seems forced. For instance, the one where Foreigner's ear is chopped off in a local fight and his buddies make it a point to go back at the scene and search for it. Even the climax, with the gang's police encounter, when they consider surrendering by waving a 'white underwear', is supposed to draw laughter.

By the way, the main cop in the film R K Singh, is Mukul Dev who is too-cool-to-wear-his-uniform.

A still from Meeruthiya Gangsters

Oh yes, there is the presence of an actress, Nushrat Bharucha as Mansi, just for the sake of it. The director seems to imply that a woman only creates rifts with a group of male friends.

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More than depicting the 'adventurous' lives of these six friends, Meeruthiya Gangsters looks like an attempt to justify that Meerut is a complete criminal city. Forget the message, the film is just a juxtaposition of a few locally shot scenes, some of them supposedly violent and funny.

It seems like a tribute to the nuances of Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur, but fails to deliver on screen. Each character has an unusual trait but only Ahlawat and Dahiya manage to translate a bit of that on screen and are just about tolerable.