Review: The Criminal Life in Mumbai in ‘Sacred Games’

                    Sacred Games

Sartaj Singh, the hero of the new Netflix series “Sacred Games,” is a familiar figure in the landscape of hard-boiled fiction: the hapless honest cop whose integrity has cost him promotions, the respect of his crooked colleagues and the devotion of his wife. Because he works in Mumbai, his stalled career also means there’s no running water in his apartment.

“Sacred Games,” adapted from Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel, opens the latest front in Netflix’s international campaign: India, offering both a vast pool of potential subscribers and an entertainment industry with global appeal. An array of future Indian projects has been publicized, but for starters Netflix has chosen a production from the same genre as a previous success, the American-Colombian “Narcos.” A gangster saga with a history lesson is apparently the best algorithm for cross-cultural success.

“Sacred Games” doesn’t feel generic, though. Energetic and entertaining, if not entirely satisfying (four of eight episodes were available for review), it toggles between stylized melodrama and loose-limbed satire — hewing, perhaps a little too closely, to the structure of Mr. Chandra’s sprawling novel.

The series begins with a bang, as Singh (Saif Ali Khan) is contacted by an anonymous caller who sits, Wizard-of-Oz-like, before a bank of computer monitors, distorting his voice and masking his location. The caller turns out to be Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a notorious Mumbai criminal who’s been missing for years and thought dead.