Rana Naidu is a series about family ties (and often, the lack of it). With the first season being semi-criticised for its overt violence and depiction of gratuitous sex, Season 2 of the Netflix show sees its makers go slightly easy on the former and mostly do away with the latter. The result is eight episodes that perhaps reach out to a wider demographic, but a series that has lost much of its bite. And we don’t mean just in terms of the (rather welcome) clampdown on cuss words.

What Rana Naidu does carry forward from one season to the next is the absence of nuance. This is an example of writing, directing and acting which is pretty much on the nose. Subtlety has been a bad word in the world of Rana Naidu, and it continues to be so.

Rana Naidu is an adaptation of the American TV show Ray Donovan. A strongly written and stylishly executed series that kept viewers more or less hooked, despite its shortcomings, Ray Donovan benefited greatly from superlative acts by Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight, playing a father and son who cruise through the world of crime with a prickly, unresolved dynamic hanging like the sword of Damocles over their heads.

‘Created for India’ by Mirzapur man Karan Anshuman and directed by him along with Suparn Varma and Abhay Chopra,
Season 2 has Rana Daggubati slipping into the title role once again. His estranged father, Naga, is played by Rana’s real-life uncle Venkatesh Daggubati. Those who have watched Season 1 (or better still Ray Donovan) are familiar with the setup. Rana is a fixer whose work entails cleaning up the ‘mess’ of his powerful celebrity clients. But he is quite the failure when it comes to the messy relationships within his family. His dad, having spent the better part of two decades in jail, wants to mend the relationship (but not mend his ways), but the Naidu family — comprising Rana’s wife Naina (Surveen Chawla) and his brothers Tej (Sushant Singh) and Jaffa (Abhishek Banerjee) — teeters on the brink of dysfunctionality.

Season 1 ended with Rana leaving the employment of corrupt politician O.B. Mahajan (Rajesh Jais), but as we all know, there is nothing that can keep Rana Naidu from getting his hands dirty again. Even as his old adversaries rear their ugly heads and his relationships go awry, Rana finds himself facing a new nemesis — Rauf Mirza, the ‘king’ of Koliwada, played by Arjun Rampal. There is the all-powerful tycoon Viraj Oberoi (Rajat Kapoor) and his constantly warring offspring — Alia (Kriti Kharbanda) and Chirag (Tanuj Virwani). Dino Morea is also present in the mix.

Rana Naidu hits the ground running, but over the course of eight episodes, each of 50 minutes duration on an average, the series seems to operate in rinse-repeat mode. Rana — described at one point as: “Tumhari dhaad bhi kamaal ki hain aur dahaad bhi” — pulls out all the stops to protect his family, with his misdeeds putting them in danger in the first place. Betrayal, brutality, back-stabbing and broken relationships are all par for the course. But apart from a few moments when the screenplay lifts to offer something engaging, there is very little that the new season has up its sleeve.

Various kinds and levels of bad accents abound. The acting, too, remains uneven. Rana Daggubati has an overpowering presence, but the stilted dialogue delivery — that was also a problem in the first season — is jarring. Daggubati Sr doesn’t fare much better, with his semi-clownish role this season doing Venkatesh no favours. It is only Surveen Chawla, Sushant Singh and, to some extent, Abhishek Banerjee, who hold Rana Naidu together, as does Rajat Kapoor. But there is only that much an actor can do when the writing is this weak and non-impactful. All of Kriti Kharbanda’s lines seem like she is reading them straight off a teleprompter. A Montessori kid reciting a nursery rhyme will bring in more feels than she brings to the entirety of her screen time. Tanuj Virwani overdoes the spoilt man-child act.

Arjun Rampal is a welcome addition to the franchise, and excels as a trigger-happy gangster whose ambitions are far more than just being a gun for hire. One wishes there was more of him.

Ray Donovan ran over seven seasons. Unless Rana Naidu comes back all guns blazing, we are done (and dusted) here.