Brooding sequel to saga of good and evil

Asur 2

Hindi (Jio Cinema)

Director: Oni Sen

Cast: Arshad Warsi, Barun Sobti, Ridhi Dogra

Rating: 2/5

When Asur 1 was released, we were in the clutches of the pandemic. The doom and gloom of the series sat well with our collective sense of foreboding. The series became a surprise hit. Now Asur 2 is here, carrying the weight of its predecessor’s success and huge audience expectations.

It begins well enough, taking off from the sombre ending of the first season where CBI officer Nikhil Nair’s morally upright choice makes him lose his most precious precious kid. A guilty and grieving Nikhil (Barun Sobti) is suicidal even as he pops anti-depressants by the hour. His wife Naina (Anupriya Goenka), whizzkid coder and constant whiner, has internalised their tragedy and wants to break free of all shackles, moral and otherwise, and demanding a divorce from Nikhil is only her first step.

Meanwhile, rogue officer Dhananjay Rajpoot (Arshad Warsi) is taking a break in Dharamsala where he is more restless than restful. And Nusrat (Ridhi Dogra) is as lost and haggard as she was in the first season. So you see, the cats are all busy and the mice can thus have a field day. And under the guidance of their chief ‘asur’ Shubh Joshi (Vishesh Bansal and Abhishek Chauhan), the many mice, sorry ‘asurs’, brainwashed into robotic perfection, do their bit to create mayhem with more gruesome murders. The increasingly intense rampage gets the ‘devas’ to regroup and plan out strategies to defeat this ever-growing evil.

So far so good. But as the series hurtles towards its underwhelming climax, the main flaw in the writing becomes evident. Asur wants to stuff everything in — mythology, cryptocurrency, malware, AI, bots, and machine learning, not to mention evenly distributed grey shades for all characters. The result is headache-inducing. And oh, our chief whiner-coder is so sharp that she breaks through multiple firewalls in seconds, while the rest can only gape.

Still, to give the makers credit, the pace holds and the acting is uniformly solid. One wishes they had explored the philosophical underpinning of the ‘asur’ residing in all of us instead of going in for such excess.