Why Byomkesh Bakshy Fails in Comparison to Sherlock Holmes

Countdown to 5 reasons why Detective Byomkesh Bakshy failed to meet expectations

Let’s face it – Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, despite having a lot of good things fell short of expectations somewhere in the third act. In comparison Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes excelled in almost every way. But why the comparison, you ask? Because it is clear that without the existence of that movie, this one would never have been made. (Spoilers ahead)

5. The Humor

Dibakar’s film was beautiful to look at, but bleak and almost entirely devoid of humor. The only scene that rendered giggles was in the finale when Anand Tiwari’s Ajit asks the servant to spare the blood and get the tea. Ritchie’s film, on the other hand was a laugh riot from start to end. The salty Brit humor padded the gaps between the plot points and kept you entertained, something Bakshy’s indulgent pace could have done with.

4. The Protagonist

As likable as Sushant Singh Rajput was, he was no Robert Downey Jr Rajput’s unibrow makeup and costumes did most of the work, and there was no quality about Bakshy that stood out in the film that you would remember. With his terrific British accent and sarcastic one-liners Downey disappeared into his role, which is all the more commendable considering his gigantic off screen persona.

3. The Antagonist

There is a big difference between the two films, Sherlock Holmes introduced its villain in the opening scene, while Byomkesh played out as a whodunit. Mark Strong in Ritchie’s film was perfectly menacing, with a foreboding quality to him. Neeraj Kabi as the master villain Yan Guan was rather hammy and jarringly over the top, especially in the violent epilogue.

2. The Camaraderie

What do you most remember the Ritchie film for? The back and forth between Sherlock and Watson, of course. That should really have been the case in this film but despite many scenes together, the banter between Byomkesh and Ajit is rather unexciting. Ultimately the bond between Byomkesh and Ajit was neither for purists nor for those who dig modern cinema.

1. The Logic (or rather the lack of it)

Both films had the plot device of the ‘Bad Guy Mysteriously Rising from the Dead’. But while the Ritchie film carefully presented the clues and deconstructed them, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy took gigantic leaps in logic. The reveal of Neeraj Kabi as the baddie in the interval was predictable. But that would still have been fine had the film not attempted to be over smart and presented a whole second layer of a reveal in the finale. It turns out that Kabi’s character deliberately reveals himself to be ‘Minor Villain A’ in the interval, to divert Byomkesh from his true identity, which is ‘Master Villain B’.

This was painfully contrived to say the least. If he was the Master Villain all this time, why involve the detective in the case in the first place? Why make him stay inside his house? Why give him a false trail of clues so that he digs deeper into the case thereby endangering his gigantic conspiracy? This was a super genius villain who made everyone believe that he was dead, kept his identity hidden for years, covertly planned and executed a scheme to get Japan to attack Calcutta and run a global drug empire, and thereby have both India and Japan at his finger tips. Why sacrifice all the hard work by putting a well known detective directly on to the case? If all this weren’t enough he even tags along with Bakshy to the factory containing the dead body. We’d have to enlist Holmes himself to make sense of this one.