Jee Karda review: It’s tripping so much on its own ‘vibe’ that it cannot find its own identity!

Jee Karda review: Four More Shots Please but this time it’s about a group of seven boys and girls who are childhood friends from school!

Jee Karda review: Get a few hot-looking people, add in some steamy sex, sprinkle some issues, and blend this all with high-octane drama, glamorous costumes, and over-powering music, and hey pesto what do you get? A Four More Shots Please? No Prime Video's newest offering - Jee Karda! Irrespective of all the cosmopolitan shit show Four More Shots still had a voice, something to say but Jee Karda is massively confused. Because of this, it does not get to be an all-consuming escapist bang-on drama with a flair and is a million times far away from being a realist socialist drama. Don’t get me wrong, there might be an audience for this as people definitely might relate to these characters! But for me, it is not raunchy enough to be devoured as an excellent guilty pleasure. At best it is mediocre entertainment that is trying too hard to be everything.

There are two cis het couples, Sheetal (Samvedna Shukla) and her husband, financially not well-off who cannot find space for romance in Mumbai while living in a Gujarati household of a joint family and often sneak out to the bathroom for quickies. And then there is Lavanya (Tamannah Bhatia) and Rishabh, (Suhail Nayyar), financially too well-off, soon-to-be-married high-school sweethearts who have all the space in the world but are confused about whether they are confusing "comfort for love". Melroy (Sayan Banerjee), a queer character treated as a 'queer is trendy' trope has a traumatic and abusive past and naturally opts for an abusive and toxic relationship. Now comes the turn for the singles of the group - a Punjabi singer-rapper (seemingly a mix-up of Badshah and Honey Singh), Arjun aka AG the OG (Aashim Gulati), the official bad boy with a traumatic past of no father figure and a defense mechanism of hiding all his feelings under alcohol, partying, and sleeping around. And the other two are hopeless romantics yet practical mature people, Preet (Anya Singh) and Shahid (Hussain Dalal), who always get the shorter end of the stick handed to them by this unfair world and the poisonous people they fall for.

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On paper, as a concept, Jee Karda has a mix of everything you probably need to make it work but somehow it isn't able to! It's hard to pinpoint what is wrong with this show when it is all bad. You got to give it to the creators Arunima Sharma, Hussain Dalal, and Abbas Dalal for maintaining uniformity for being terrible at everything! There is no depth whatsoever to any character which is a shame for a character-driven story. No wonder the entire ensemble cast seems too loud in their acting assignments rather than complicated, contemplative, and layered. It’s hard to say who didn’t act up to the mark when they all acted pretty badly. But what more do you expect when they are working on an exaggerated version of just one emotion?! At one point Tamannah Bhatia breaks down and instead of being sad for her, I couldn't control but laugh at her.

Though there are some beautiful dialogues and scenes that show you glimpses of what the show could have been if done right. But to your disappointment, Jee Karda has a massive identity crisis! Every twist and turn which had to be “oh-so mysterious” is ruined by so much exposition that anyone watching can predict what’s gonna happen next. At one point in time, a proposal goes wrong because the woman reveals she is already married, and trust me it’s not this twist that will make your head spin it is the other person’s casual reaction to this that definitely will.

You got it right I am not really a fan of the show but the illogical disjointed connection between the lives of adults and their past childhoods threw me off completely off. Even the cast of young children for adults' backstory is bad because interchanging some of them would have worked better! But trust me that's not the worst part of it, because it is the writing which is some of the lamest lazy writing I have seen. The show starts in 2005 with a couple of young kids visiting a baba and a prophecy is made for them all! A poor kid is told "beware of your status", a hopeless romantic is told "beware of love", a fatherless child is told "beware of your father" similarly a brotherless child is told, (can you guess?) "beware of your brother", the gay kid is told "to be brave", and since the baba ran out of things to say, a kid gets "beware of 2022". So it's rather unfortunate for me as no one told me "beware of the show"!

It somehow feels like structuring the writing is an afterthought as they want either the rather bearable music by Sachin-Jigar to make sense of the scenes it is playing behind or they want to somehow reach the end as predicted by the start. Sample this- by the end a casual throwing away of a cigarette bum leads to a fire so that the "brotherless kid" could say "you burnt down my house" to his "so-called brother" making the prophecy true both metaphorically and literally.

This tropey sitcom-style story, about friends from school who remain, friends forever till they reach their 30s (a luxury not everyone can afford) is too greedy as it wants to achieve everything by just checking off tick boxes. It's in such a speedy rush to tell the messy and vast story that it has no space for anything, even for itself! And is shouting at the top of its lungs “look I am cool” in spite of being one! There is no problem with high-octane drama with sexy hot people who all the time look like they have come right out of a magazine cover. But the condition is that it needs to be raunchy, spicy, sensuous, sassy, and enticing. And Jee Karda is none of it!

It's 2023, people, and banking on talking about female sexuality, or sexist lyrics in loud party songs or queer stories is just not done. It's time to move on ahead because we have been there, done that, and seen it! So don't become a "fluff piece" stuck in an old era of following trends while the world has already moved on to creating new unique trends. Infactly there's an aunty who goes ‘What is this vibe,vibe..’ and I kind of relate to her because with 8 episodes I am also going like what is this vibe and where is it!

Jee Karda is streaming on Amazon Prime Video!

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