Sacred Games Review

Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap split Netflix's first Indian original down the middle. Motwane directed the present, in which Saif Ali Khan's Sartaj Singh, an honest, stalled inspector in a corrupt force, takes a call from the vanished crime lord Ganesh Gaitonde telling him to save the city within 25 days. Kashyap directed Gaitonde's climb through the Bombay underworld in flashback, with different cinematographers and a different pulse.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Gaitonde is the reason to watch: vain, funny and frightening, narrating his own legend in street Hindi, and his boast that sometimes he feels like God became a meme across India. Khan gives one of his best performances as a man too decent for his job, and Jitendra Joshi's constable Katekar is the show's heart. The writing by Varun Grover, Smita Singh and Vasant Nath keeps the novel's profanity and its politics.

The second season, with Neeraj Ghaywan replacing Motwane as director, loses its grip. Pankaj Tripathi's guru and an apocalyptic plot hatched in his ashram take over, a detour to Kenya stalls Gaitonde, and Tanul Thakur of The Wire wrote that it lacked the urgency, the wicked humour and the heartfelt bonds of the first. The New York Times named the first season among the best international shows of the decade, deservedly.