The premise of everyday people attempting to commit crime in order to get enough money to escape the grind of their mundane lives isn’t a rare theme in cinema. Why toil all your life when you can do one job and in the words of Rolex from Vikram, get a lifetime settlement? Bad Trip, running on such similar sentiments, feels like a distant cousin of films like DJ Tillu (2021) and Brochevaruevarura (2019), where a motley bunch of desperate souls, aided with with a clear motive to solve all their problems, plan to pursue a huge sum of money wickedly, only to watch those plans fail and the resultant consequences place their lives in jeopardy. While DJ Tillu succeeds with its wicked comedy and Broche…with its rooted writing and philosophical takeaways, Bad Trip, much like the travellers in its story, is let astray with its weak writing and lackadaisical direction.
Creator – Krishkan
Cast – Ravi Varma, Krishna Chaitanya, Giridhar, Archana
Bad Trip starts with a struggling writer Ved (Ravi Varma), a shady stuntman Abhi (Krishna Chaitanya) and a working-class taxi driver Santosh (Giridhar), who meet each other in a shared ride. Their very first interaction is characterised by a set of accidents. Santosh gets a taxi ride despite switching off the option that gets him customers from the ride-sharing app. He gets another surprise when he learns that it is a shared ride, not a solo one. Abhi, who is on the run from goons, hops on to save himself. A couple more accidents and a grand taxi theft later, they realise that they can earn 3 crores by kidnapping Reva (Archana), the wife of a real-estate tycoon who is in an affair with a female bartender. The men decide to participate in the abduction, after a Squid Game style-second episode where they soberly come to grips with their lives, which hold no promise or happiness. Soon enough, they take the path less travelled, where the mistakes they commit snowball into errors, misunderstanding, backstabbing and crimes they haven’t planned commiting in the first place. As one reaches towards the end of the series, every single character is in a state of panic, as they collectively tiptoe around with the confusion of the proverbial headless chickens.
The title Bad Trip here has a literal meaning, of an unpleasant commute and a metaphorical meaning, that of an undesirable psychedelic experience. There is an attempt by the technical team of the series, for sure, to visually elicit a sense of psychedelia, with prominent neon lighting in a story that entirely takes place in the night, alongside a cinematography consisting of one too many pan shots, arc shots and hazily edited inserts. These efforts, however, do not create the desired viewing experience for the audience, owing to its patchy writing, which does little to showcase the depth of characters or smoothen the flow of events to build stronger pay-offs.
There is an attempt to juxtapose the characters of Abhi and Ved to represent a debate between street-smarts vs bookish knowledge, and what style of thinking would augment better for carrying crimes, but the writing of the series as a whole suffers excessive exposition, which takes us away from what the makers were trying to achieve on a cinematic level and put the story on par with the experience of watching a play or listening to a podcast. Seasoned character actors Giridhar and Ravi Varma attempt to bring sincerity to their roles, but there is only so much one can do with the story they have been provided with. The portrayal of a queer relationship in the series, for the large part, made me wince awkwardly. What distinguishes cinema from television is the potential one has for writing with more depth and detail in the latter medium. What distinguishes television from OTT, at least on a prima facie level, is the ability to take all that writing and use it to explore subjects and stories with greater risks and lesser censorship. Bad Trip, as a whole, feels like it adopted the memo of lesser censorship and increased risks, without the necessary incorporation of effective screenwriting.
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