To be honest, I loved the trailer of the new Netflix film ‘Class of ’83’. It was intense, intriguing, with a gripping background score that blended perfectly with the narrative. But like some trailers, the makers packed in all the best bits in the teaser to draw in viewers.

The film is set in the bustling Bombay of the 1980s, when gang-wars were rampant and blood stained the city’s streets. The plot is loosely based on a novel by Hussain Zaidi, a former investigative journalist who is famous for his crime-writing. Actor Bobby Deol plays the role of an honest upright cop, who is punished by the political class for trying to fight the system. He is banished from active duty and is posted as the dean at a police academy in Nashik. In his new role as the dean, he trains five young cops to beat the system and help eliminate all the key players of the Bombay underworld.

This could have been a great crime film, but all of its potential is wasted and the actors are failed by bad writing and poor action direction. The guns go booming several times in the movie, but none of the scenes are shot well. There is not single action sequence that holds your attention or makes you go ‘woah’. The dialogues are unnecessarily heavy and drown the viewer’s interest. It appears that the script-writers were trying too hard to sound witty, so almost every line sounds like terrible attempts at making it to a ‘cool quote’ book. There is no normal banter between anybody. Most dialogues are delivered with a dead-pan face.

Luckily for Bobby Deol, his character is written to be the broody types, so he does his part well. The five actors who play the young firebrand killer cops just don’t have enough back-stories to make their partnership seem genuine. The makers waste time in freeze-frames where nothing is happening and in some useless flashbacks to Deol’s past with his wife. Instead, they could have worked on giving the younger actors more space, for the viewer to be able to connect with their characters.

The climax is just underwhelming and hackneyed. There is an intense gun-fight, well, it should have been intense, but it wasn’t. Just some boring ‘bang-bang-bang’ and the film heads to its conclusion.

Anup Soni, the actor who became a household name by hosting the popular Indian TV ‘Crime Patrol’ does a fair job with the little part he has as the corrupt politician in cahoots with the goonda class. Unfortunately for him, ‘Crime Patrol’ episodes are way more interesting than this film.