Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2 is emotionally hollow and shallow. It seems as if the film has been ironed until it is so flat and so white-hot that its emotional essence has completely evaporated and all you can see are one-dimensional malicious minds with such a relentless drive for violence and betrayal that you burns eyes . Rubbing your eyes with nettle is probably less stressful than watching Gangs of Wasseypur.

What Kashyap basically does here is similar to what Ram Gopal Verma did in his Sarkar movies, except Kashyap’s treatment is much more believable; while Verma’s Sarkar offerings usually ended with the all-knowing Subhash Nagre (played by Amitabh Bachchan) magically unraveling the grand scheme of his enemies and framing every possible guy introduced during the film, Kashyap’s Wasseypur Part 2 features characters who they crave power over the desire for revenge and thus can easily switch allegiances unlike the protagonists of the first film. Unfortunately, each character is so smart that we don’t like their world one bit.

There is no soul in this film, and if there is then his dead and even his funeral have been treated crudely. There is no theme in this film that is deeply explored, and what we see is only the choppy waters above. None of these characters questions their actions much and they all seem elated at being bad all the time. We end up admiring Kashyap’s grand scheme of Wasseypur, but are so emotionally distanced that he becomes unable to treasure this film in our hearts; his soul is black as coal and too hot to handle.

Without a doubt, Anurag Kashyap is smart when it comes to making his film aesthetically and stylistically captivating. His film does not repeat itself and tries to be as inventive as possible. He considers the beginning of it, when the Wasseypur saga picks up with the assassination of Sardar Khan at the hands of the Sultan. We see the same part from the point where Sardar leaves Durga’s house until his death at the petrol pump; Kashyap knows here that his audience would not like to see the same scene as it was in the previous part. He then shows the same scene using different camera angles, for example in Wasseypur 1 we could only see Durga’s back as he looked at Sardar through the curtains, but this time we see her from the front. Kashyap modifies the same scene to make it less repetitive for those who saw the first part. So what happens in the movie after Sardar’s death is that his son Danish runs with the other men of the family to the place where Sardar’s body lay. Finding one of the assassins in the police jeep, Danish violently attacks him in front of the defenseless policemen before shooting him dead. Sardar’s funeral is held and is enlivened with music by the same band that he played during Danish’s marriage.

Later, Danish goes after another killer and creates his alibi by turning himself in to the police for a minor crime he didn’t even commit. However, as he leaves the court, Sultan’s men shoot him dead and so there is the second funeral in the family with the same band singing. With Sardar and Danish down, it’s up to Faizal to avenge the deaths of his brother, father, and grandfather Shahid, but his family has little hope for Faizal, a daydreaming drug addict, until he mercilessly beheads his close friend Fazlu after suspecting that his betrayal (Fazlu tries to influence Faizal to go against his father and those who have seen the first part will remember that it was he who instigated Sultan to assassinate Sardar). He marries Mohsina, the movie-mad lady he’s had a crush on since childhood (leading to a hilarious sex scene where the whole family is kept awake by the sound of his rickety bed shaking with its humps) and then expands his gang’s operations into the illegal scrap metal business. Taking advantage of his poor business acumen, Shamshad Alam, a transport entrepreneur, joins Faizal in his steel business and tries to trick him. Faizal’s younger brothers also grow up to become just as dangerous as him, but they are very reckless and openly aggressive unlike the much more calculating Faizal. Their names are worth mentioning here: two are called Perpendicular and Parallel, while the third, the son of Sardar Khan and Durga, is called Definite. Of these three names, only Definite’s real name is the same, ie Definite and here I have to mention another clever moment that is tinged with dry humor; it happens later when Faizal asks the people around him what Definite’s real name is and they all give him the same answer: Definite. A definitely delicious moment from the movie.

What is definitely bland in this film is the emotional connection; Anurag doesn’t want us to worry about death here, so we always watch the Wasseypur characters from a distance. The blood, gore, and lack of empathy make this distance even more pronounced. I’m reminded of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, which provoked a very similar response; Kashyap only captures the image, not the emotion. Even though there is a lot of bloodshed in the film, the emotional core of Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2 remains bloodless.