On demand: "HIT: The Second Case"

2020's HIT: The First Case was a low-budget Telugu indie so in thrall to today's by-the-book TV policiers in its methodology that it had the look of two middling episodes of primetime filler stuck back-to-back. Post-lockdown sequel HIT: The Second Case, which unfolds within the same universe but otherwise wipes the slate clean with new cast and characters, proves more expansive: suddenly there are credits for streaming partners, plus helicopter shots (which may be what streaming money gets you in today's film economy) and some editorial attempt to broach the fraught state of play between the sexes in latter-day Modiland. Conventionally hunky super-detective KD (Adivi Sesh), whose only playable character flaw is an inability to whistle, is torn away from the side of conventionally pretty girlfriend Aarya (Meenaakshi Chaudhary) by the discovery of the bisected body of a woman who manages a local bar - or to put it more forensically, the bar manager's head, positioned atop a pile of supplementary bodyparts from other female victims. As if all this wasn't grisly enough - and evidence, in its own way, that series creator Sailesh Kolanu intends to up the ante second time around - it is determined from a bite on one victim's neck that the killer must be in possession of one extra tooth. "Hyperdontia," everybody keeps saying early on, as though they'd just watched a CSI on this specific condition.

Again working with editor Garry BH, Kolanu maintains the breakneck cutting of the first instalment: for all this series' flaws and limitations, it takes skill to get a movie to move as briskly as these do. The overall impression this time, however, is of speed, marginally greater scope, and still pitifully little depth and substance. The new characters seem less rooted in the real world than yanked along on some fritzing conveyor belt or attached to a rudimentary rope-and-pulley system. KD apparently clears the case within forty minutes of screentime, only - yankkkkkkkk! - to discover exculpatory evidence at the point where a rogue squadron of colleagues are setting out to snuff the accused; naturally there are bust-ups with deskbound superiors, because that's what this genre has historically traded in. I now wonder whether the series' self-sustaining success is down to its resembling a Cliff's Notes of the police procedural, condensing both pressing social issues and an entire season's worth of developments on one of the small screen's procedural heavyhitters into a single two-hour sit. (Why binge when you can crib?) Here, the strategy is apparent even at a micro level, in dialogue that strikes the ear as a grab-bag of terminology: it's not just the hyperdontia, but the semen samples and luminol tests picked up from watching many long hours of Gil Grissom at work. At least one element is more specific to recent Indian cinema: the use of the female lead as no more than a damsel-in-distress, headed to a finale that involves dentists' chairs (hyperdontia!), indoor chainsaws and our hero's loyal dog Max. The cases are getting bigger and more lurid with it, but seem no less secondhand; you'll likely have seen something similar solved many times before.

HIT: The Second Case is currently streaming via Prime Video; a third film in the series - HIT: The Third Case - is now showing in selected cinemas, and is reviewed here.