A rising hockey star, Lucky, is admitted to rehab after a tragic accident. He kicks his drug habit, unpacks his trauma and falls for his recovery buddy, Sanober. After their breezy stint, the boy meets the girl’s volatile “family”: a hotshot Punjabi rapper named MC Badnaam, his girlfriend Paddy, and bestie Jazzy. In a heartbeat, a lovelorn Lucky is blackmailed and recruited as an informant by a narcotics officer named Gurbani; she has been working for years to bust an undercover drug ring led by none other than MC Badnaam. Now Lucky is her trump-card. But it’s not so simple. Lucky is morally conflicted as the mole; he is integrated into Badnaam’s side hustle but feels too hard for Sanober, even as a rival rapper and villain emerges as a ghost from their past. Things get knotty and violent. Cue climax at a music concert. Where else can things end?
I’ll admit I started watching Lukkhe with a bit of Genre PTSD. I blame Chamak for making me wary of the Punjabi-rap-crime-thriller-musical-romance space. If Chamak starred one of the actors from the excellent Tabbar, Lukkhe stars one of the actors from the equally excellent Punjabi-language film, Meel Patthar (Milestone). But Lukkhe is miles ahead of its long-form counterpart in terms of craft. At a technical level, it gets a few things right. The film-making is fairly flamboyant. Some of the action sequences — an opening joyride on the streets of Chandigarh; a moonlight bike chase in the fields of rural Punjab; a shootout in an underground parking lot; another one in a gaming parlour; a final brawl in a scrap-yard — are kinetically choreographed and cut. The narrative uses music well (you’d think this would be normal for its setting), underlines the right moments, and capitalises on a soundtrack that combines on-the-ground hiphop with corny love songs and Indian-Ocean-coded rock ballads; the stylised conclusion is scored to a track that manufactures the sort of gravity that visuals alone cannot.
I also like that nearly every character is the protagonist of their own lives. Each of them is driven by personal conflicts disguised as principles. Lucky (Lakshvir Saran) spends much of the show earning the trust of Badnaam (King) and gang as well as the cop. He does seem to believe in the cause as a recovering addict. But he’s really in it for himself; a guilt-riddled Lucky wants to do right by the best friend whose death he was responsible for, and he also wants to do right by the woman he loves. MC Badnaam runs a covert drug empire because he wants total power to not only defeat his rival but also avenge the assault of a loved one. But there’s a sense that he is actually addicted to power and wealth, and he’s perhaps using his revenge story as a crutch to support his own demons. Ditto for officer Gurbani (Raashii Khanna), who comes across as a fearsome woman in a notoriously sexist field, determined to do her job at any cost. But her duty becomes an obsession because of a drug-fuelled family tragedy; she, too, wants revenge but employs justice as her shield. Even the villain (Shivankit Singh Parihar) is afforded a flashback — one of mocked masculinity and an abusive uncle (Yograj Singh) — so that everything he does feels like a performance to prove himself.
Of the cast, rapper King does well to stage MC Badnaam as a madman whose celebrityhood is a front; there’s a dead-eyed duality about him that creates a compelling character arc. One of the more striking moments features Badnaam revealing the beast within while finishing off an assassin; it’s a supervillain origin story posing as a dark-protector tale. Lakshvir Saran is predictably solid as Lucky, and Raashii Khanna elevates the big-sister-shaped interiority of the cop. I particularly enjoyed the supporting turns of Nakul Sahdev’s depiction of the mercurial and muscled best friend, and Kritika Bharadwaj’s rendition of the hustling girlfriend with a heart of gold. Only Palak Tiwari’s Sanober seems like she doesn’t belong in this environment. ‘Sanno’ is Bollywood’s version of a Punjabi damsel in distress, in stark contrast to the cultural authenticity of other character.
Evidently, the parts of Lukkhe are greater than its whole. The 8-episode drama goes wrong where many homegrown shows go wrong these days — as a streaming template trying to cram in multiple genres for the price of one. As a result, there’s no single core holding it all together. The central love story between Lucky and Sanober is supposed to be an all-consuming and star-crossed romance: the kind that transcends identities and logic. But it’s far from intense, with dreamy montages having to do the heavy-lifting because the two look fundamentally incompatible. Much of their relationship is also an endless sequence of one of them breaking up and returning; their romance becomes more of a theory than a lived-in device. Lucky’s hockey career feels like an add-on; Sanober’s singing career exists without any proper stakes. It doesn’t help that she is quite oblivious of her surroundings. Her brother is a famous drug-lord behind her back, Lucky is a police mole (he’s not very good at it), and she wears pain as an aesthetic.
Lukkhe is fine when it’s still focused on Lucky and Badnaam’s adventures in the first few episodes. The world-building is engaging enough. But as it often happens, the series expands into so many directions for the sake of templates and colour — two Mirzapur-coded hitmen from Uttar Pradesh arrive out of nowhere; a sinister female kingpin pops up as a key player — that none of the tracks fully register. Some episodes open with backstories, which is alright in theory, but after a while the series seems to be padding up its runtime to last a full 8 episodes. One of them is a skit-like childhood sequence straight out of 1990s-orphan-poverty cinema (or even Taaza Khabar, which shares a director). It also seems as if Lucky’s internal conflict becomes an excuse for the screenplay to yank him in and out of the fold. After a point, it’s unclear who he’s working for and what he feels anymore; his double-life lacks the edge because Badnaam and family aren’t great at being suspicious. The truth of Lucky’s character is then lost in the pursuit of trickery and entertainment.
There’s no emotional continuity either, especially once the drama begins to have consequences in the outside world. Lukkhe struggles with this. The historical context and volatility of the Punjab music scene offers most makers the license to stage rivalries and controversies as violent national spectacles. But the bad blood between Badnaam and OG, the drug raids, the fan and media reactions, and the killings seem to be detached from the Punjab it’s set in; the rap legacies and the artistry that makes them tick are almost incidental to the plot(s). The changing allegiances and set-pieces towards the end descend into a kind of generic chaos; one primary character dies, and the others choose their destinies. Somewhere in there, a modern riff on Amar Singh Chamkila — where the musician is consumed by himself before his place in society — is lost in translation. A timeless love story is never realised. A haunted-cop investigative thriller falls through the cracks. And a Punjab stranded between righteous men and reckless whims fails to materialise. All that’s left is an all-in-one buffet after a midnight discount. Which is to say: Lukkhe isn’t bad, it’s just functional enough to be forgettable.