Pill review: An informative medical thriller that's too dull to keep you engaged!

Marking Riteish Deshmukh's OTT debut, Pill is intriguing in parts but is stretched for so long that it makes for a boring, repetitive watch! 

It is terrible to find out that the god-men-like doctors you trusted to treat you turned out to be corrupt. But it is even more horrific to find out that there is an entire nexus of pharma companies and doctors out there who are waiting to take advantage of your lack of knowledge. Wrapped inside a juicy medical thriller, this is what JioCinemas Pill wants to talk about, but unfortunately, it doesn't make it engaging enough to keep you hooked.

The show explores the murky path of illegally fast-tracked drug trials run by greedy pharma giants at the cost of innocent lives. Following the beats of any thriller, it builds up the plot as a good vs. evil fight in which pharma companies, doctors, medical representatives, government bodies, the judiciary, and journalists get involved. In this war of ethics vs cruelty of the drug industries, we find two incorruptible government officers with a conscience, Dr Prakash (Riteish Deshmukh), and Gursimrat Kaur (Anshul Chauhan), along with a snoopy investigative journalist, Noor Khan (Akshat Chauhan) and an honest employee, Ashish Verma going up against the evil owners of Forever Cure Pharma company, conniving doctors, and corrupt officials. 

Also Read: Did Riteish Deshmukh fair well in his OTT debut, Pill, according to the Janta? Let's find out!

Created by Raj Kumar Gupta (No One Killed Jessica), the eight-episode series, if anything, is extremely real and believable. It's built in a way that gives you the sense that the makers have brought in detailed observations of the real world to create this fiction. With little segues into their normal personal lives, we don't get cliched characters despite their stereotypical journeys. Hence, Dr Prakash is no hero who will save the day, and even the devilish CEO (Pavan Malhotra) isn't just a wicked villain. Rather, they are relatable common folks who get up to fight the battle because they are too tired of the corruption or have turned greedy and selfish after being conditioned by this world. Even all the medical jargon and information make the show well-researched but all of this is not enough! 

Regrettably, the series takes too much time to develop and hence becomes repetitive and muddled up. After a point of time, its inventiveness gives into the rut of the pattern, and it cannot decide what it wants to be or how to creatively and captivatingly blend reality with a racy and raunching thriller. That is why Prakash and the team's constant losing battle against a layered dishonest system becomes extremely predictable and tiring to watch. And the persistent dumbing it down through dialogues that over-explain became exhausting—so much so that I couldn't wait for it to finish soon! It is nice to see Riteish Deshmukh in a new light and he shoulders Prakash well. Pavan Malhotra, as usual, is a dependable actor who brings more to his characters, but both of them and the rest of the cast can't help you stay connected with the series. 

Inconsistencies, not thoroughly explored themes and characters, and a lack of oomph and cohesiveness in structure make this well-intentioned show somewhere lost in mediocrity. There is a constant sentence often heard in the series that when facts are told in the format of a story, they become interesting and arresting, and that's exactly what Pill is unable to do! 

Pill is currently streaming on JioCinemas! 

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