PI Meena Review: Starring a whole host of talented actors, including Tanya Maniktala, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Saurav Das, Jisshu Sengupta, Zarina Wahab, Vinay Pathak, Samir Soni and others, this Mystery-thriller series is directed by Debaloy Bhattacharya. With writing credits going to Arindam Mitra, as well as co-writers Ronak Kamat and Vipin Sharma, and music by Amit Chatterjee and Rohit Kulkarni, the Amazon Prime Video series has 8 episodes, each with a runtime of around 40 minutes.
PI Meena Plot
Grappling with a personal tragedy from years ago, Meenakshi Iyer gets pulled into a complicated and confusing case at her day job that results in her going deeper and deeper into a bigger conspiracy that she was never ready for. Spanning several states but taking place primarily in Kolkata, Meena goes on a dangerous adventure that puts her life in danger at every moment.
– PI Meena Review Does Not Contain Spoilers –
PI Meena Review
The mystery genre is a fun time for all, regardless of age – a shadowy organisation, with words like Big Pharma popping up here and there to make us think of a bigger conspiracy, a woman with a streak for doing the right thing, and a viral outbreak after COVID. All the trappings of a great show, right?
Weirdly enough, PI Meena feels a little like The Jengaburu Case in some ways, with bigger conspiracies that endanger locals and a connection with people we wouldn’t have thought of before. It’s a cliched storyline at this point that starts with something small and then moves rapidly towards something shocking.
The first thing that I thought of after watching PI Meena is that Meenakshi’s workplace is quite lax when it comes to her work. For 8 episodes, she runs around solving a random case that has nothing to do with her day job, gets shot at, gets colleagues to work on this big thing and causes a ruckus at an ex-client’s house. It’s wild to see how her job is ok with her doing these things and going off-script constantly. I wish we all had jobs wherein we could simply do anything we wanted at our jobs and get away with it!
Coming to the case at hand, the series follows story threads of several people that come together as one eventually – something that we seem to be getting a lot of these days. Most shows these days focus on some big conspiracy in the higher levels of society that is out to wipe out chunks of people in the country. It’s not too much of a far-off concept, and conspiracy lovers will have a field day with the madness that comes with topics such as these, but with several shows now focusing on the same story-telling technique, you will be able to figure out what’s happening from a mile away.
Meenakshi Iyer, although a private detective, feels like a petulant schoolchild who is annoyed with everything and everyone. Her attitude is annoying, and although I get that she’s going through stuff in her personal life, she comes off as someone who is unprofessional and, thus, someone we can’t really follow. She doesn’t follow rules, which is fine for a protagonist in a conspiracy story, but she is also quite unbothered about the consequences of her actions, which feels annoying and selfish.
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The storyline is quite convoluted, with stuff happening all over the place. Now, things like this are believable, but the way the story goes about with this story is unbelievably silly. It’s not like there are not enough twists of the people who aren’t interesting enough or without depth; most have something or the other going for them. However, the central mystery that we follow is just plain boring. The story’s flow is so incredibly jarring that focusing on one single thing at a time is extremely hard.
As PI Meena reaches the last few episodes, it just gets worse. The storyline is all over the place, with several plot holes and the worst of all – it ends on a cliffhanger. I don’t know what it is with streaming platforms these days, but they just release everything in several instalments, regardless of whether or not the audience wants that. A convoluted and cliched storyline like this, which could’ve been better if there was some resolution of some kind, also ends on a random note in the middle of the Howrah Bridge because why not?
Let’s not even talk about how everyone around Meenakshi speaks in Hindi when the entire storyline takes place in Kolkata. At least it’s full of Bengali actors who nail their dictions and don’t just blurt out random cliched phrases to showcase that they are, in fact, Bengali. However, everyone looks a bit awkward in the series for some reason which makes viewing this all the more confusing and annoying.
Also, Alexa users might want to use earphones for this one and be prepared for some unnecessary, god-awful jumpscares that pop up randomly and for no reason because this isn’t a horror show, just a detective one.
PI Meena Review: Final Thoughts
In the end, PI Meena is a confusing and unnecessary series that doesn’t bring forth anything new or exciting. Although there is a thrilling story there somewhere, it doesn’t do a good job of bringing it forth and instead goes round and round with a boring story and a very annoying protagonist who just does whatever she wants without any thoughts about others. Honestly, there are better stories out there.
PI Meena is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.