Fourteen years since the release of Rock On (2008), Arjun Rampal has taken the opportunity to experiment more with his roles and character choices in the age of OTT streaming. Garnering attention for starring in Amazon Prime Video’s Daddy (2017), the actor appears to have drawn from the same well to passionately portray Detective Om Singh in Voot Select’s London Files. The result is a grizzled, trauma-affected protagonist with a prescription drug and vaping problem, poorly attempting to combine the stoic intellectual abilities of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and the emotional vulnerabilities of Idris Elba’s Luther.
Despite ambitious aims and Rampal’s solid, workman-like performance, the series stands on a shaky narrative ground alongside a substandard cast, as London Files is more of a forgettable damp squib than the purported ‘international thriller’ at the breakneck pace it has been promoted as.
Little relevance to core issues
Director Sachin Pathak and writer Prateek Payodhi opt to take things slow at the outset of this six-episode series. Rather than overstuffing the opening sequences with pointless contextual information, they liberally use flashbacks where Detective Singh is mentally placed two years after a personal tragedy. Pathak and Payodhi establish the significance of the disappearance of media executive Amar Roy’s (Purab Kohli) daughter and Maya (Medha Rana).
Their non-linear approach sounds great on paper, but, in practice, remains riddled with clichés, shlocky twists, and on-the-nose social commentary. Rather than letting the narrative breathe and play out organically, London Files collapses under the weight of stunted dialogue, awkward bilingual transitions, and a drowning outscore that appears to be cranked up to 11 whenever something remotely unexpected is about to happen. These issues not only break the realism for the viewer but also undermine Pathak and Payodhi’s goal to put forward a gritty thriller focused on important issues prevalent in London society.
But London Files’ greatest disappointment is that it tells, doesn’t show. For all the focus on immigration, crime rates, and Amar’s contribution to the problem as a xenophobic ‘bill pusher’ with a sexual harassment record, we see little meaningful interaction with immigrant civilians themselves.
Also read: Netflix’s Cobalt Blue isn’t flawless. But its queer heart beats the shortcomings
Shoehorning, worst excesses
As a whole, barring the constantly grey skies and side characters with British traits, London Files doesn’t make the most of its setting or give a compelling background to connect the anti-immigrant sentiment to the central plot.
Rather, all we get is repeated generic dialogues mentioning attacks that Maya had previously faced from unnamed immigrants for her father’s lobbying and constant warnings about the damage Amar’s Bill would do to immigrants in the country with a targeted crackdown on the community.
Instead of engaging seriously with the subject matter in focus, it appears as if Pathak, Payodhi, and the team tried to take the easy way to strike cultural relevance by shoehorning these simplistic references. As a result, Rampal’s potential is wasted, though the lack of chemistry between the cast as a whole doesn’t help either.
London Files gradually moves away from its Luther-esque premise to introduce more chaotic outlandish elements, including the key role of Gopal Dutt and a terrorist plot. However, the poorly executed introduction leaves the rest of the episodes with too much to do, so the narrative comes apart at the seams.
What could have been a genre-bending, thematically hard-hitting product usually seen in Bong-Joon Ho’s work (or even Alex Rider) is instead a third-rate thriller, amplifying the worst excesses of Sherlock and Luther without retaining their strengths.
By the time the dust settles, the mystery behind Maya’s disappearance is unmasked and hurtles towards a conclusion — London Files ultimately presents enough rope to hang itself with. Exasperating, rather than containing any kind of meaningful payoff, Pathak, Payodhi and Rampal’s sojourn into London’s seedy underbelly is a miniseries with limited appeal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)