In the 2024 Telugu feature film Matka, Varun Tej played a real-life gambling tycoon . The vintage cars, the hair styles, the songs of the era…they were all there. And yet, the film felt vacant, unlived…
Amazon’s new series Matka King leans into the avaricious world of street-level gambling… and the wages of sin, if you want to find the moral core of a series that obstinately plods on the surface, leaving little room to explore the desperation of incurable gamblers.
I mean, the Kauravas gambled away Draupadi. There is none of that urgency in this series. You feel none of the sweat or dread as desperate men huddle in dingy spaces to try their luck.
The series also looks at the caste system in gambling: horse racing versus matka. How is it any different whether you gamble on horses from the galleries or get your feet muddy in the world of grassroots gambling?
All of this, director Nagraj Manjule, who once upon a time made the classic on casteism Sairat and nothing worthwhile thereafter, brings into play without really knocking into the interiors of the world of gambling for high and stakes.
The writing frequently feels lazy. The actors don’t feel committed to getting it right, not when the writing feels shaky and compromised. Vijay Varma is definitely an asset to the gambler’s saga. But he has lately become dangerously predictable in his emotive overtures. We know exactly how he will react to a situation even before he reacts.
In comparison, Ishtiyak Khan, in a relatively brief part as a ruthless moneylender, brings menace to the mood of sketchy sinisterness. The women are even more hazy, none more so than Kriti Kamra, whose Parsi act is so phony it feels like a caricature.
The dramatic tension is never palpable. We enter the shady world of gamblers and losers without feeling their pain or anxiety. It’s like a lowlife in a bubble. Never quite getting it right. But never really losing grip completely on the narrative either. Very often Matka King feels like Hansal Mehta’s Scam in a scummy stratosphere. The gambling misadventures feel like a distant pain that we never get to share. These are people who don’t earn our empathy.
