Review: Mirzapur: The Movie

Mirzapur: The Movie earns its scale by trusting the ensemble it already built across three seasons rather than reinventing the wheel for the big screen. Pankaj Tripathi drops every trace of the comic register he is often typecast into and plays Kaleen Bhaiya as a man who has simply stopped pretending to be reasonable, and it is the best he has been in this role since the show first found its footing. Ali Fazal matches him beat for beat in what is genuinely his most massy, crowd-facing performance yet, and Jitendra Kumar, stepping into a role Vikrant Massey originated, does the hardest job in the film and clears it: he never once feels like an impersonation.

Puneet Krishna's screenplay, slotted into the gap between episodes six and seven of the first season, understands the assignment: give people who never watched a single episode enough to follow along, while rewarding the ones who did with callbacks that land. The film does not really need that framing device to work, which says more about the strength of the writing than the gimmick does. Where it wobbles is the back half, which piles on one confrontation too many and could have found its ending twenty minutes earlier than it does.

Four stars, with the fifth withheld for a runtime that overstays its welcome exactly when the plot should be tightening, not loosening. Everything else, the ensemble, the confidence of a director making his feature debut, the sheer commitment of actors who clearly know this world cold, is exactly why this earns the label the trade keeps reaching for: paisa vasool.