Summary
Choona provides a familiar caper with great characters and a generous sense of fun, making it well worth a look for genre fans.
Everybody loves a heist, not least the good folks at Netflix. The streamer has been pulling a fast one on consumer’s wallets with price hikes over the years, and it’s also home to one of the genre’s all-time greats, Money Heist. But if Netflix are good at anything, it’s milking something popular until its udders puff out dust, so there’s always room for another entry in a popular subgenre. Hence, Season 1 of Choona, an eight-episode Indian heist thriller from Pushpendra Nath Misra.
For all their mainstream crowd-pleasing appeal, a heist is a tough thing to pull off. It needs a sharp script to set up various interconnected elements that’ll coalesce down the line. It needs pinpoint editing to bring it all together at the end. It needs a villain you want to see get ripped off and a team of specifically skilled eccentrics who you can root for to do it.
Choona has all of these things to various degrees, making the caper a fun, engaging time for as long as it lasts. Enjoy our spoiler-free review.
It’s simple, really – a ragtag team of underdogs taking on a politician, the have-nots versus the haves, the downtrodden versus the powerless. It’s a revenge tale wrapped up in a caper, basic enough thematically, but complex enough formally.
Where Choona excels, though, is in two areas. One is its deft balance of humor and drama; more serious notes with knockabout ones. The other is its characters.
It’s the latter element that really sets Choona apart. Its plot is skilfully put together, but it’s most impressive in how it weaves real character development through the past and present with a unifying narration. The characters are vividly drawn, well-acted, and fun to be around – probably the most crucial aspect of a series that wants you to spend nigh on eight hours in their company.
Jimmy Shergill as the menacing antagonist is a great foil, but the central team is a riot. Struggling alcoholic contractor JP (Vikram Kochhar), Baankey (Gyanendra Tripathi) and his sister Bela (Monika Panwar), heavy Ansari (Aashim Gulati), the unpredictable Triloki (Namit Das), and the classic inside man Bishnu (Chandan Roy) are good fun, varied in their utility and personality, but the brightest touch might Pandjit Ji (Atul Srivastava) as a kind of spiritual guide.
There’s an old saying about the journey being more important than the destination, and that holds true here with a heist plot that is familiar in its components and ultimately quite predictable in its outcome.
You can forgive some elements of contrivance, which are basically obligatory in the genre anyway, just for the pleasure of spending a bit more time with these characters and seeing how they react to various crises. And while the show overall might not be as tightly plotted as some of its contemporaries, it trades that watchmaker’s precision for a looser, lighter, and sometimes even mystical quality that is refreshing.
Fans of the genre will find plenty to like in Choona. It’s no Money Heist, granted, but nothing is. It will nonetheless do the job, though, providing a fun, funny good time. A show that’s as generous with the entertainment factor as this one is worthy of at least a little respect, and hopefully Choona finds an enthusiastic audience among the Netflix thumbnails.
Read More: Choona Season 1 Ending Explained
