Actors grow up so quickly. It seems like only yesterday that Jimmy Shergill was playing the fresh-faced young Karan in Mohabbatein, and how he's playing grizzled, world weary policemen in movies like Collar Bomb (2021). It's an amazing transformation.
Update: I have just been informed that Mohabbatein was released in the year 2000, and Shergill has had a very busy career over the last twenty one years. So it's a slow transformation, but still impressive.
A year after the tragic death of high school student Neha Potkar, her exclusive private school holds a memorial service, which also serves to honor the police officer who solved the case, SHO Manoj Hesi (Jimmy Shergill). It's an awkward ceremony; the murdered girl's mother can't bear to even look at manoj, while his son Akshay (Naman Jain) is mortified when he realizes just why he received his admission to the school. Then Manoj's drunken former partner Ratan Negi (Ajit Singh Palawat) makes a scene. And then a gloomy young man named Shoeb Ali (Sparsh Srivastav) bursts in and takes the entire school hostage.
Ali has a gun, which he demonstrates by shooting a school nurse (Rajshri Deshpande) in the arm, but he also has a collar bomb clamped around his neck. Ali issues a number of confusing and horrible demands, including that one parent of each child must die in order for their children to be freed, and then he hands Manoj an earpiece.
The voice on the other end of the line (later identified as "Rita") gives Manoj a series of tasks, violent, criminal tasks, in order to save the children. After each task is completed, Rita reveals one of the four codes needed to unlock the bomb attached to Ali. Meanwhile, Manoj is pursued by the police, including his former protege Sumitra Joshi (Asha Negi.)
Manoj is a perfect noir protagonist, jaded and cynical, deeply flawed, but with the remains of a sense of honor and duty about him. It's very clear almost from the start that he's hiding something about the investigation into Neha's disappearance, and all the horrible events of the present spiral outward from that original sin.
Rita, on the other hand, is basically a Batman villain. She's planned for absolutely everything, including Manoj's unpredictable investigations, she has a great deal of skill in explosives and electronics and a supernatural talent for poisons, she has a theme which barely gets mentioned, and she has a sympathetic background and motivation but quickly reveals herself to be an enormous hypocrite.
In other words, the protagonist and antagonist come from different genres, and as a result the tone of the movie can swing wildly. Sometimes it's The Big Sleep, sometimes it's Saw, but it never entirely holds together. It is consistently dark and gritty though, and a long way from Mohabbatein.
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