Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2 by Anurag Kashyap is emotionally hollow and superficial. The film seems to have been ironed until it is so flat and so hot that its emotional essence has completely evaporated and all you can see is one-dimensional malicious minds with such a relentless drive for violence and betrayal that it burns your eyes. . Rubbing your eyes with nettle will likely cause less stress than watching Gangs of Wasseypur.

What Kashyap does here basically is similar to what Ram Gopal Verma did in his Sarkar films, except that Kashyap’s treatment is much more credible; While Sarkar of Verma’s offerings generally ended with the omniscient Subhash Nagre (played by Amitabh Bachchan) magically unveiling the grand scheme of his enemies and framing all the possible types featured during the film, Kashyap’s Wasseypur Part 2 features characters that yearn the power over the desire for revenge and thus can easily change allegiance unlike the protagonists of the first film. Unfortunately, each character is so sharp that we don’t like their world one bit.

There is no soul in this movie, and if there is, then she is dead and even her funeral has been treated crudely. There is no theme in this movie that is deeply explored, and what we see is only the choppy waters upstream. None of these characters question their actions much and they all seem to be ecstatic at being bad all the time. We end up admiring the grand scheme of Wasseypur from Kashyap, but we are so emotionally estranged that it becomes unable to appreciate this movie in our hearts; his soul is black as coal and too hot to handle.

Without a doubt, Anurag Kashyap is smart when it comes to making his film aesthetically and stylistically gripping. His film does not repeat itself and tries to be as inventive as possible. Consider its beginning, when the Wasseypur saga resumes with the assassination of Sardar Khan at the hands of the Sultan. We observe the same part from the point where Sardar leaves Durga’s house until his death at the gas pump; Kashyap knows here that his audience would not like to see the same scene as in the previous part. So it shows the same scene using different camera angles, for example in Wasseypur 1 we could only see Durga’s back as she looked at Sardar through the curtains, but this time we see her from the front. Kashyap modifies the same scene so that it is less repetitive for those who have seen the first part. So what happens in the movie after Sardar’s death is that his son Danish rushes with the other men in the family to the place where Sardar’s body lay. Finding one of the killers in the police jeep, Danish violently attacks him in front of defenseless cops before shooting him to death. Sardar’s funeral takes place and is enlivened with music from the same band that played during Danish’s marriage.

Later, Danish searches for another killer and creates his alibi by turning himself in to the police for a petty crime he didn’t even commit. However, when leaving the court, Sultan’s men shoot him dead, so there is the second family funeral with the same band singing. With Sardar and Danish down, it’s up to Faizal to avenge the deaths of his brother, father, and grandfather Shahid, but his family has little hope for Faizal, a daydreaming drug addict, until he mercilessly beheads his close friend Fazlu after suspecting of the. treason (Fazlu tries to influence Faizal to go against his father and those who have seen the first part will remember that it was he who instigated Sultan to assassinate Sardar). He marries Mohsina, the movie-crazy woman he had a crush on since childhood (leading to a hilarious sex scene in which the whole family is kept awake by the sound of his rickety bed shaking with her fucking) and then he expands the operations of his gang to dealing with the illegal sale of junk business. Taking advantage of his lack of business acumen, Shamshad Alam, a transportation entrepreneur, joins Faizal in his steel business and tries to deceive him. Faizal’s younger brothers also grow up to be as dangerous as he is, but they are very reckless and overtly aggressive unlike the much more calculating Faizal. Their names deserve a mention here: two are called Perpendicular and Parallel, while the third, the son of Sardar Khan and Durga, is called Definite. Of these three names, only the actual name of Definite is the same, that is, Definite and here I have to mention another witty moment that is permeated with dry humor; It happens later when Faizal asks the people around him what Definite’s real name is and they all give him the same answer: Defined. Definitely a delightful moment from the movie.

What is definitely bland about this movie is the emotional connection; Anurag doesn’t want us to worry about death here and that’s why we always watch Wasseypur’s characters from a distance. Blood and gore and a lack of empathy make this distance even more pronounced. I remember the movie Zero Dark Thirty, which elicited a very similar response; Kashyap only captures the image, not the emotion. Although there is a lot of bloodshed in the film, the emotional core of Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2 remains bloodless.