Mirzapur: The Movie — More Bhaukaal, Less Brevity

There's a moment about ninety minutes into "Mirzapur: The Movie" when the drumbeat of a familiar Kaleen Bhaiya rejoinder lands, and even before you've registered the throwaway obscenity attached to it, the theatre erupts. Fan service can be a lazy crutch, but here, in this interquel from director Gurmmeet Singh, it's engineered with genuine craft — a reminder of how much cultural furniture this franchise has installed in seven years.

For those who don't know: "Mirzapur: The Movie" doesn't attempt to move the story forward. Instead, it slots itself into the gap between episodes six and seven of Season 1, back in 2018, when Kaleen Bhaiya's grip on the Purvanchal underworld was still unchallenged from within, before the deaths that would later fracture this world. It's a clever structural choice. It lets Puneet Krishna, the series' creator and the film's writer, bring back characters the show killed off, without so much as a wink of retcon. A new threat — a power player out of Jaisalmer — arrives to rattle the equilibrium, giving the plot its forward motion even as the audience knows, more or less, how the larger story eventually unspools.

Pankaj Tripathi remains the film's gravitational center. His Kaleen Bhaiya has always worked because Tripathi refuses to play him as a shouting don; the menace is coiled, unhurried, delivered in a register just above a murmur, which makes the violence around him feel more shocking by contrast. Ali Fazal's Guddu is all barely-contained fury, physically imposing in a way the film leans on for its action sequences, while Divyenndu's Munna is still the franchise's most purely entertaining creation — volatile, insecure, and strangely watchable even when he's being monstrous. The recasting of Bablu, with Jitendra Kumar stepping into a role originated by Vikrant Massey, is the film's riskiest swing, and reactions to it have understandably been mixed; Kumar is a fine actor, but the substitution is impossible not to notice if you've watched the show. The film's real discovery, though, is Ravi Kishan as Babban "Babua" Yadav, who brings a jolt of unpredictable energy every time he's on screen, enough that several critics have singled him out as the movie's standout newcomer.

Where the film runs into trouble is its length. At roughly three hours and seventeen minutes, "Mirzapur" indulges its world past the point of narrative necessity. There's a padded middle stretch where the plotting slackens, scenes that exist to remind you a beloved character is still around rather than to advance anything, and a sense that a tighter cut — trimmed by half an hour or more — would have hit considerably harder. The film's female characters, meanwhile, continue to be underserved; Rasika Dugal, Shriya Pilgaonkar, and Shweta Tripathi are all capable performers given comparatively thin material, a long-standing criticism of the show that the movie does little to address.

None of this seems to have hurt the film commercially or with audiences — it's crossed ₹300 crore worldwide, and audience scores (IMDb sits around 7.7) run well ahead of critical consensus, which hovers closer to 3 to 3.5 out of 5. That gap tells you almost everything about who this film is for. It is not trying to convert skeptics or win over people unfamiliar with the show; it's a victory lap for an established fanbase, complete with whistle-worthy dialogue, a crowd-pleasing climax, and a post-credits stinger clearly designed to tease what comes next.

Should you watch it? If you've sat through Season 1, at minimum, the answer is yes — this is best understood as bonus material elevated to theatrical scale, gaining real charge from a packed, reactive audience. If you're coming in cold, or if three-hour-plus runtimes and heavy violence wear on you, this isn't the place to start. "Mirzapur: The Movie" isn't essential cinema, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's a chaotic, gleefully profane family reunion for a world built on betrayal — indulgent, occasionally exhausting, but rarely boring.

Rating: 3.5/5