Before the kindly Sartaj can wrestle with the transgression asked of him, he receives a mysterious phone call from a legendary gangster long thought to have fled the country, Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). A Sikh member of the Mumbai police force - perhaps a part that should’ve gone to a Sikh actor so few are given roles in the Indian mainstream - Sartaj is an outsider caught in a web of corruption, unwilling to compromise when his superior, DCP Parulkar (Neeraj Kabi), instructs him to change his statement on a fatal police shooting. In a world of relative morals, Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan) is a good man in almost absolute terms. As a whole however, it’s a haphazard, hamstrung morality play that can’t seem to balance its moving parts. Its imagery is propulsive, when divorced from any larger context. Unshackled from the censorious constraints of Indian cinema, it’s an often ambiguous, unapologetically violent work set against Mumbai’s criminal underbelly.
It bleeds street-level authenticity seldom seen in the Indian mainstream - characters speak Hindi, Marathi, English and Punjabi, though the series’ default audio setting internationally is its English dub - trading in the polished poetry of Bollywood dialogue for uncouth, often hilarious swearing. Bollywood mainstay Saif Ali Khan leads a who’s-who of tremendous talent in a show helmed by two of the industry’s most interesting directors, but its spectacle lies mostly in its lurid texture.
Sacred Games, the first Indian Netflix series, ought to have been spectacular.
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