Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2 is emotionally hollow and shallow. It seems as if the film has been ironed until it is so flat and red hot that its emotional essence has completely evaporated and all you can see are one-dimensional malicious minds with a relentless drive for violence and betrayal that you burns the eyes . Rubbing your eyes with nettle is probably less stressful than watching Gangs of Wasseypur.
What Kashyap basically does here is similar to what Ram Gopal Verma did in his Sarkar movies, except Kashyap’s treatment is much more believable; while Verma’s Sarkar offerings usually ended with the all-knowing Subhash Nagre (played by Amitabh Bachchan) magically unraveling his enemies’ grand scheme and framing every possible dude introduced during the film, Kashyap’s Wasseypur Part 2 features characters who they crave power over the desire for revenge and can therefore easily switch allegiances unlike the protagonists of the first film. Unfortunately, each character is so smart that we don’t like their world one bit.
There is no soul in this film, and if there is then his dead and even his funeral have been treated harshly. There is no theme in this film that is deeply explored, and what we see is just the choppy waters above. None of these characters question their actions very much and they all seem elated about being bad all the time. We end up admiring Kashyap’s grand scheme of Wasseypur, but we’re so emotionally detached that he becomes unable to treasure this film in our hearts; his soul is pitch black and too hot to handle.
No doubt Anurag Kashyap is smart when it comes to making his film aesthetically and stylistically captivating. His film does not repeat itself and tries to be as inventive as possible. He considers the beginning of it, when the Wasseypur saga resumes with the assassination of Sardar Khan at the hands of the Sultan. We see the same part from the point where Sardar leaves Durga’s house until his death at the petrol pump; Kashyap knows here that his audience would not like to see the same scene as it was in the previous part. He then shows the same scene using different camera angles, for example, in Wasseypur 1 we could only see Durga’s back while he was looking at Sardar through the curtains, but this time we see her from the front. Kashyap modifies the same scene to make it less repetitive for those who watched the first part. So what happens in the movie after Sardar’s death is that his daughter Danish runs with the other men in the family to the place where Sardar’s body lay. Finding one of the assassins in the police jeep, Danish violently attacks him in front of the defenseless policemen before shooting him dead. Sardar’s funeral is held and is enlivened with music by the same band that he played during Danish’s marriage.
Later, Danish goes after another killer and creates his alibi by turning himself in to the police for a minor crime he didn’t even commit. However, as he leaves the court, he is shot dead by Sultan’s men and thus there is the second funeral in the family with the same band singing. With Sardar and Danish down, it’s up to Faizal to avenge the death of his brother, father, and grandfather Shahid, but his family has little hope for drug-addled dreamer Faizal until he mercilessly beheads his close friend Fazlu after suspecting his betrayal (Fazlu tries to influence Faizal to go against his father and those who have seen the first part will remember that he was the one who instigated Sultan to assassinate Sardar). He marries Mohsina, the movie-crazed woman he had been in love with since childhood (leading to a hilarious sex scene where the whole family is kept awake by the sound of their rickety bed shaking with its humps). and later expands his gang’s operations into the illegal junk sales business. Taking advantage of his poor business acumen, Shamshad Alam, a transport businessman, joins Faizal in his steel business and tries to trick him. Faizal’s younger brothers also grow up to be just as dangerous as he is, but they are very reckless and openly aggressive unlike the much more calculating Faizal. Their names are worth mentioning here: two are called Perpendicular and Parallel, while the third, the son of Sardar Khan and Durga, is called Definite. Out of these three names, only Definite’s real name is the same i.e. Definite and here I have to mention another witty moment which is tinged 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: Definite. A definitely delicious moment from the movie.
What is definitely bland in this movie is the emotional connection; Anurag doesn’t want us to worry about death here, so we always watch the Wasseypur characters from a distance. The blood, the gore and the lack of empathy make this distance even more pronounced. I am reminded of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, which provoked a very similar response; Kashyap only captures the image, not the emotion. Even though there is a lot of bloodshed in the film, the emotional core of Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2 remains bloodless.