Envoy Score: 2/5
Hawala is a short Telugu web series streaming on Zee5. Touted to be a thriller, it fails to strike the right chord making it a passable fare.
Karan (Gourish Nandhan Yeleti) is a small time gambler who wants to make it big and switches over to betting on cricket. Solely relying on his gut feeling and sixth sense, he secures a bounty through hawala. He ropes in his lady love Vani (Anusha) to play his sidekick cum ethical hacker in order to collect the winnings securely.
The modus operandi to collect the money is overheard by a conman, Guna (Tarun Rohith). He hatches a plan to steal the hawala money with the help of Nisha (Jayasree Kshatriya). He succeeds and now it’s Karan’s turn to retrieve his easy earned money as well as teach a lesson to Guna and his henchwoman.
In order to justify the thriller tag line, Guna and Nisha go on to steal a necklace from a jewellery shop and plan to leave the city to start a new life in Mumbai. This sojourn creates an opportunity for Karan and Vani to foil their plans.
There ensues a cat and mouse chase with Karan and Vani in hot pursuit to relieve Guna and Nisha of the bounty with which they plan to escape. This is followed by one of the weakest climaxes (if it can be called as climax at all) ending the ordeal thus leaving the audience baffled.
Let’s try to figure out brighter side in this web series first followed by negative points which of course outnumber the positive ones.
Shot on a shoestring budget, the upcoming director Kowshik Bheemidi deserves the appreciation for his sincere effort in his first venture. He has to take this as a cue to develop further to churn out more engaging fare in future.
The camera work of Revanth Levaka has uplifted the nonexistent script to another level, particularly the chase scene and the way the action has been captured in and around Charminar (Hyderabad). Furthermore, Anand Sundeep Raj’s music is another plus point without which the whole series would have been very flat and tedious.
Coming to the performances, Gourish Nandhan Yeleti as Karan and Tarun Rohith as Guna did well. As per the script, there is nothing more to emote, express, act or perform. The leading ladies Anusha and Jayasree Kshatriya are promising as they get reasonable screen time to exhibit some kind of talent which they fulfil with ease.
Kowshik Bheemidi has the spark in him which is evident in a couple of sequences. However, when it comes to execution part, the wafer-thin plot becomes a drawback. It fails to sustain the interest of the audience. Hopefully, the makers try to put more effort in creating a more sensible and acceptable second season.
Hawala needs to be watched as a last resort if you run out of options. Even if you give it a miss, nothing changes.
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