‘Chamak: The Conclusion’ Series Review: All Roads Lead To Nowhere 

Director: Rohit Jugraj
Writers: Rohit Jugraj, S Fakira, Geetanjali Mehlwal Chauhan
Cast: Paramvir Singh Cheema, Manoj Pahwa, Mohit Malik, Isha Talwar, Prince Kanwaljit Singh, Suvinder Vicky, Navneet Nishan, Akasa Singh
Streaming on: SonyLIV

I admire ambition. But ambition without direction can be like an ice cream cone without the ice cream: hollow, weird, tasteless and sad. Sorry for the analogy, but I was left with a sticky cone in my hand after my ice cream scoop met the footpath last week and I’m still salty (not sugary) about it. It wasn’t even a waffle cone.

Coming back to Chamak, rarely has so much ambition resulted in so little. It’s a miracle that this musical drama manages to be 12 episodes long without making a Punjab-sized dent in the OTT landscape. The series is disjointed and distracted, but it generously allows the viewer to be just as distracted. I found myself doing some chores, learning of Hollywood star Val Kilmer’s death, watching Real Madrid highlights and reading about the IPL — all of this while six episodes of Chamak: The Conclusion (the first 6 dropped in 2023) played in the background. But the empty cone, in this case, elicits sympathy. It’s a lot of production, money, writing, acting, culture, songs, sound. It’s hard not to feel for a show that works so hard to tell a story.

Chamak reimagines the Amar Singh Chamkila tale as a fictional generational saga of revenge: a young rapper named Kaala (Paramvir Singh Cheema) flees Canada, lands in dark Punjab, discovers he’s the son of slain legend Tara Singh (Gippy Grewal) and makes it his life’s goal to find his parents’ murderers. The first part ruled out conspiracies like honour killings, and traced Kaala’s meteoric rise as a rapper in modern-day Mohali. It also quickly released before Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila (2024), making it the first of two Sony LIV shows to get first-mover advantage before a similarly-themed mainstream feature — the second being Ram Madhvani’s Jallianwala Bagh courtroom drama, The Waking of a Nation, dropping before the upcoming Kesari Chapter 2.

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Chamak: The Conclusion (or part 2) continues what could’ve been a fertile premise; you can tell from the whimsical montages that the makers have watched Ali’s film, too. The suspense behind who did it is deflated early on. A now-famous Kaala narrows it down to his father’s three former friends and business partners: record label owner Pratap Deol (Manoj Pahwa), mentor Jugal (Suvinder Vicky) and Baldev (Hobby Dhaliwal). He focuses on Pratap because Jugal said so, but at no point does the fundamental motivation of Kaala make sense: why is he suddenly so hell-bent on finding the killers? Where does his emotional investment come from? His transformation and desire for revenge never feel natural; he’s obsessed with a past he never knew.

Kaala’s journey is massively convoluted, lending new meaning to the phrase “taking the scenic route”. At times, it’s not even his journey anymore. The series bides its time and keeps padding up the primary conflict with more characters and countless mini-narratives; sometimes, the script feels like it reverse-engineers itself into situations that fit the many songs. The eclectic soundtrack deserves a better platform, not least because none of the characters seem like they’re capable of belting out (or lip-syncing) those powerful folk voices. Kaala also gets involved in a Baazigar-meets-Succession arc: Pratap’s daughter and two sons yearn for their domineering dad’s validation while dreaming of taking over his music empire. The Number One Boy of them is Guru (Mohit Malik), the gay son who abruptly goes into Michael Corleone-mode after assassination attempts on the patriarch. There are also the two heartbroken women in Kaala’s life: aspiring singer Jazz (Isha Talwar) who goes on a drug-fuelled spiral, and Lata (Akasa Singh), the mournful daughter of Jugal. They only exist so that Kaala can be an awry and violent rockstar for the heck of it; he goes back to one of them the second he gets the revenge out of his system (explicitly stating that he feels lighter and in need of companionship). Such a man’s man.

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There’s also Jaggi (Prince Kanwaljit Singh), Kaala’s friend and the deadly gun hired by every other person to bump off the next person. There’s also an old journalist, veteran label manager Rocky (Navneet Nishan), sepia-tinted flashbacks of Tara Singh and his ‘friends', a screen that beats like an animated B-movie heart to imply drug addiction, and so on. Not to mention the aggro Canadian cop who vowed to hunt down Kaala in the first part. A stray scene in the last episode shows him still vowing to hunt down Kaala after his son dies. Things move slowly in this universe. Everyone’s waiting to be written in and out of sequences.

There’s so much going on that the series often forgets what it’s about — or if it’s just a bit of everything and nothing. The rhythm is off: if someone drops an apple in a shot, gravity goes for a walk and the apple seems to hit the ground an hour later. Guru seems to be occupying a separate coming-of-rage film, Jazz is on her own trip (literally), Jaggi is lurking through a hinterland hitman thriller, Kaala looks perpetually confused and sullen, Pratap blows hot and cold, and the few characters on the periphery of the action naturally turn out to be the shady ones. Even its unpredictability is predictable.

A still from ‘Chamak: The Conclusion’.

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There are glimpses of what Chamak might have been beyond its aesthetic. Like when Guru Deol decides to expand the empire and mine the role of Punjabi music in pop culture and Mumbai; or when Kaala keeps visiting the spot of his father’s murder and tries to feel the ‘spirituality’ of that fateful morning. Or even when Manoj Pahwa’s Pratap expresses his frustration with his three nincompoop kids by calling them “ch*tiyon”. But then you see a car driving through the gates of a tacky AI-generated studio lot, or a doctor declaring that the patient is in a coma and praying to God will make things okay. You see a celebrity limp out of a helicopter and jog through a crowd of fans as if nobody recognises him. And you see the threat of another season in an ocean of streaming (dis)content. Forget the cone, even the ice-cream is refusing to melt on the footpath.