9 Hours Review: This bank robbery series has both hits and misses

Title: 9 Hours (Telugu)
Cast: Taraka Ratna, Vinod Kumar and others
Directors: Jacob Verghese and Niranjan Kaushik
Rating: 2.5/5

(‘9 Hours’ is a Disney+Hotstar web series running into nine episodes in total. This is the review of the first season, which started streaming on June 2)

It is 1985. A roll call of prisoners at Hyderabad’s Central Jail is being taken. A well-mannered and seemingly pacifist prisoner delivers a Bhagawad Gita sermon to the prisoners. Somewhere in the city, a supercilious Telugu cinema hero insults a wannabe star’s lousy dancing skills. At a bank branch in the city’s bustling locality Koti, a lecher gives a widow the creeps. The walls of a video parlour in the vicinity are splattered with cinema posters but there is a dirty secret hiding behind one of the walls. A bank employee is on the cusp of starting a new life after his retirement, while a beautiful new female employee is brimming with hope and is later sought to be wooed by a youngster. There is also a cute couple who behave like they can’t live without each other for 143 minutes at a stretch. 

Like a bolt from the blue, three prisoners escape from the Central Jail and reveal themselves as robbers who want to pull off Hyderabad’s greatest bank robbery ever. This is how ‘9 Hours’ takes off. 

But even the reasonable start is not a so-far-so-good scenario. You can gauge the trajectory of the series’ multiple tracks from how the characters are introduced. With the honourable exception of two or three characters (especially Vinod Kumar’s jailor), they are a bundle of cliches. 

The robbers know no mercy and one of them is a sexual creep as well. The moment they realize that they can’t rush out with loads of stolen cash, they turn even more macabre. CI Prathap (Taraka Ratna) has arrived at the crime scene, leading the operation against the robbers. The bank’s doors have been shut by the robbers, who use the civilians (read bank customers) as a bargaining chip. 

The non-linear narration doesn’t burn you out despite the fact that this is a 9-episode marathon. The overlong run-time is no major handicap unless you are looking for a twist every 10th minute. But ‘9 Hours’ is inadequate on a crucial front. It doesn’t deliver a punch in the gut. The hostage drama doesn’t have the gravity of a crisis. The script intensity swings between pale ingredients like villainous laughter and uneventful phone calls made by the cops to the robbers. The negotiations between the two opposing sides are never-ending. They seem to be in a time loop, especially with the chief robber reminding the cops umpteen times that every civilian life lost is a moral loss to the police system. 

Ajay’s character is a complex one. Since the series is based on a Telugu novel written decades ago, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the novelist Malladi Venkata Krishna Murthy was ahead of its times in fits and starts. Taraka Ratna’s cop character is not predictable either. But his discord with Madhu Shalini’s journalist character is lackluster. A sex worker’s love affair with a negative character turns out to be a convenient plot turn rather than an emotionally incisive idea. 

The survival drama trappings deserved a better canvas, and a profound script. Torture and beatings are no substitute for thrills and drama.

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Watch the trailer below: