Violent cop: "HIT: The Third Case"

That The Third Case has become the first in the HIT series to make the UK Top Ten is doubtless largely down to the presence of Nani, the South Indian superstar whose production company has helped finance the franchise. Having been persuaded this will be an ongoing business concern, the actor appeared on screen at the end of 2022's second instalment in the guise of one Arjun Sarkaar, a bad-ass detective introduced with a trussed-up body in the back of his SUV. As The Third Case opens, Sarkaar isn't so much bad-ass as actively disgraced, standing trial and eventually serving time for murder, having been caught on camera stringing a body up from a tree and cutting his victim's throat. The bulk of the movie that follows, again written and directed by Dr. Sailesh Kolanu, will be an exculpatory flashback explaining why the protagonist broke bad so, and another first for the series: the story of a detective effectively investigating himself. That's an intriguing hook, and one of several major improvements here that may only be possible when a conscientious, audience-savvy star climbs aboard, determined to up a previously middling serial's game and convert what's hitherto been multiplex filler into a bonafide (ahem) hit. For starters, Arjun Sarkaar feels like a graspable, fleshed-out character rather than a mere police sketch, afforded contradictions, quirks, medical conditions, his own thick-eared sense of style. And this script is markedly funnier than what's come before. While waiting for his victim to bleed out, Arjun grumbles to a call-centre employee about India's subpar 5G coverage; when it comes to his personal life, this notionally grown man proves such an alienating oddbod that the father he still lives with (stored in our antihero's phone under "Dad - Do Not Answer") has him signed up to a marriage site. The hook isn't just a detective investigating himself; it's that - at long last, after four previously indifferent hours - the series has finally alighted upon the one character who merits a full interrogation.

Kolanu, accordingly, takes his time in this. "Don't be in such a hurry," advises potential love interest Mrudula (Srinidhi Shetty) after a first date that goes surprisingly well, given everything we've discovered about Arjun; these become the film's watchwords, too. There were but two years between the first and second cases, during which time Kolanu was recruited to oversee the Hindi remake of the Telugu original; that possibly explains why all those films seemed to scramble over the finish line. Three years have passed between cases two and three, the latter of which runs two-and-a-half hours rather than the usual two, and at almost every turn, The Third Case bears out the advantages of a director allowing himself more time to make connections and think things through. Kolanu still pushes onwards at some clip through the genre's inevitable exposition, and he actively accelerates into his setpieces, such as a Maoist attack on a police station, the likes of which can't have featured in many films made after 1974. Yet he's also armed himself with the valuable weapon of suspense, as in one early sequence that deftly intercuts between simultaneous raids on three suspects' properties. (Cases one and two implied Kolanu had been bingeing CSI on his downtime; The Third Case suggests he's sat down with The Silence of the Lambs, which is very definitely an upgrade.) The latter comes during a first half that packs the livewire Sarkaar off to Kashmir, this of all moments, and while one might question the delicacy of this - doubly so when our man begins throwing his weight around in Muslim-owned workshops loaded with buzzsaws and sharp objects besides - for the very first time in the whole series, the B-movie material starts to take on an electrifying edge: we're watching a bull set loose not in a china shop, but mortally contested territory. Should Kolanu have set up permanent basecamp there? Instead, with the restlessness of the modern mass movie, he turns away from the real world and into the realms of the virtual. This case's primary site of interest turns out to be a dark website, something like Facebook for sickos, found organising its annual, bloody in-person knees-up. (The dress code - white tuxedo - would appear somewhat impractical, given the levels of arterial spray occasioned; a Pacamac would be a better suggestion.)

Even here, though, that curious "Dr." appellation Kolanu affords himself comes to make sense, for The Third Case ventures beyond this series' prevailing interest in crime-scene forensics to offer its own multiplex science lesson. Cut to the quick, those first two cases were if anything too lean for their own good - they looked and played like TV movies, Frankensteined together from the body parts of a dozen other procedurals. In The Third Case, the blood has time to pool and clot, and the material attains the density and walloping heft of the pulp the HITs have perhaps always aspired to be. You see it - clearly now - in the regular recurrence of prime pulp images: Sarkaar standing with a killer's knife wedged in his torso, in the headlights of an abandoned breakdown truck; the rhyme encoded in the cop's everyday patrol outfit (stubby cigar, baseball bat used to clout ne'er-do-wells); a juxtaposition between bloodsoaked hero and a gladiatorial portrait adorning the walls of a Burmese palace. Kolanu even allows himself flickers of pulp wit: balancing rhymes, involving three separate locations in the film's second half and Sarkaar being stabbed in the exact same spot. (Blood upon blood.) There is much you could choose to be queasy about amid this gory impasto: a love song where Sarkaar prowls the corridors of a sleeper train, trying to find somewhere unoccupied to fuck one of his academy students; a sublimated sex scene between the detective and a female sociopath. We're always aware we're watching an especially baroque form of copaganda, as if the Law & Order franchise had been wrestled out of Dick Wolf's hands by a shiv-wielding Takashi Miike. Yet where the first two films struggled to generate much beyond shrugs, The Third Case has plenty to make you shudder, jolt and spill your popcorn; when it's not thrashing around like a wild beast, it pulses and throbs as keenly as a flesh wound. Suddenly, out of nowhere - struck whether by the lightning bolt of creative inspiration, or detailed notes from a committed producer-star - this series is alive. It's alive!

HIT: The Third Case is now showing in selected cinemas.