Suchin Mehrotra reviews The Revolutionaries, created and directed by Nikkhil Advani and streaming on Prime Video, for The Hollywood Reporter India. After Rocket Boys and Freedom at Midnight, this is the third leg of Emmay Entertainment's spiritual trilogy on independent India's origins, loosely adapted from Sanjeev Sanyal's book and set in the early 1910s. It follows Rash Behari Bose (Bhuvan Bam), Sachindra Nath Sanyal (Rohit Saraf), Bagha Jatin (Gurfateh Pirzada) and Pratibha Lahiri (Pratibha Ranta), with Jason Shah as the British officer hunting them.
Suchin's view is that the show is sold as an action-drama but is really a lavishly mounted poetic drama with a few stray action scenes, and that the sets, costumes and raw material of spycraft, heists and shootouts are all there while the heart only shows up in moments. His biggest struggle is the scattered, puzzle-piece structure that keeps cutting away from characters backed against a wall to set up subplots that pay off episodes later, plus a story too thin to fill eight long episodes.
Bhuvan Bam brings the rage but not the mind of a mastermind, Gurfateh Pirzada is in fine form, Rohit Saraf's arc is brave but underfelt, and the most well-etched character is Jason Shah's stuttering, sinister Dyer, with Paoli Dam's Nanibala Devi the unsung hero Suchin wishes he'd seen more of. The THR Bottomline: Suchin felt like he was constantly hovering above The Revolutionaries but rarely sucked into it, with lots to appreciate but little to be absorbed by. The Revolutionaries is now streaming on Prime Video.
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