Lukkhe Review: Prime Video’s newest musical action series blends rap culture, crime and romance in Punjab, where love and drugs come together, revealing the darker side of the world. In the middle of this is Lucky, who has been pulled into a world that was previously unknown to him. The series aims to deliver Lucky’s gritty and emotionally charged journey from an inexperienced youngster to someone well-versed in the murky happenings of the underground world.
Lukkhe mixes drug-induced, crime-fuelled tension with snazzy underground music battles, and the genre crossover comes as something new for the OTT audience.
Lukkhe Prime Video Cast
King, Raashii Khanna, Palak Tiwari, Lakshvir Singh Saran, Nakul Roshan Sahdev, Kritika Bharadwaj, Shivankit Parihar, Yograj Singh, Akarsh Khurana, Ayesha Raza
Lukkhe Series Director
Himank Gaur
The series has 8 episodes, each with a runtime of around 40 minutes.
Lukkhe Review
Plot summary
The story follows young sportsman Lucky, who finds himself in trouble after falling for Sanober and getting embroiled in her unstable family. The more he gets into her life, the more he realises that the problem isn’t just that they are dangerous, but that they are being wanted by the police. As threats from all sides increase, Lucky must make one difficult decision after another to make the morally right decision. However, with Sanober’s heart about to be broken, what is right?
At its core, Lukkhe is all about ambition and love and how it collides with consequences. As Lucky’s personal dreams are constantly threatened by doing the right thing and getting Sanobar’s love, things get more dangerous for him at every turn, making this a tense and thrilling journey.
Direction & execution
Himank Gaur turns the story more stylish than anything else, relying on fast cuts, pulsating music and gritty visual palettes to add to the thrill of the runtime. While that’s great, and the series’s focus is clearly on style over substance, the series feels hollow and uneven thanks to the pacing. Some episodes push the narrative forward, but most of the time, things stand on unsteady ground, with the vibe not matching what’s being shown on screen.
The execution doesn’t match the pace of the story, which is bloated and has nothing distinctive to say. This is mostly a confused anti-drug story that tries to be as memorable as possible with its fast cuts and dark & dreary storytelling, but the core story lacks a lot of depth, and thus, it mostly remains a stylish but hollow addition.
Themes & tone
Lukkhe has several themes, including ambition vs morality, fame and identity in rap culture, love under pressure and brotherhood & betrayal. The series holds up several important topics of discussion and holds a consistent dark and dreary tone that highlights how difficult Lucky’s decisions are. However, viewers will find themselves wondering why this man would choose to get into something this difficult over a person they have just met. It goes to show that the series doesn’t make us believe in Lucky and Sanober’s relationship, and when things invariably go out of hand, viewers end up wondering whether this is worth the hassle.
On that note, viewers will also find themselves unable to believe the scope of the unfolding situations, and as the tone swings between extremely serious and melodramatic, things get unbelievably funny. It’s hard to believe these things are happening at this pace, and funnier still are the characters who constantly make incorrect decisions. One can say that the series highlights unhealthy attachment styles and how trauma affects us, but then why go to a rehab and not continue to see a specialist if one faces such debilitating attacks?
On the other hand, there is the antagonist, OG, who is a Disney villain along with his father. Both are cartoonishly evil, and it’s hard to take either of them or their actions seriously because they act in ways that scream fabricated. It misses the gritty tone and believable evil that left me hooked to Glory a few days ago. Furthermore, OG’s story is an interesting one, with him suffering from the effects of toxic masculinity that has consumed his life. The series doesn’t ponder on it too long and, instead, chooses to use it as a tool to make Shivankit Singh Parihar do cartoonishly evil stuff.
Performances
Lakshvir Singh Saran is the innocent Lucky who had the boy-next-door charm that could’ve easily morphed into a broken man having seen too much too quickly. However, his character is left to do uncharacteristically inhuman things that he seems to be completely okay doing instead of getting intel on a dr*g empire. One would argue that mu*der is objectively worse than dr*g peddling, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Several such moments make you question the legitimacy of the characters, which negatively impacts the series.
King makes his debut as an actor in the series and is the serious and no-nonsense older brother with a sad background. He’s stiff and unmemorable and isn’t able to bring the complicated emotions of his character to life. Raashii Khanna is the traumatised cop with an agenda to see her state dr*g-free. It’s a cause viewers will get behind, but her motivations seem to ignore any other bad things that are taking place around her. Lastly, Palak Tiwari, as Sanober, is the perfect scapegoat for all the men to use to act violently. It’s not hard to understand why that is, because her character lacks depth other than her (very real) trauma.
Final Thoughts
Lukkhe is definitely ambitious and stylish, but the storyline and pacing are confusing and lack depth. Things happen in the series one after another, as if to keep viewers entertained, but it fails to make an impact because nothing seems genuine. Overall, this is average and fails to make viewers truly feel like a part of the story.
What are your thoughts on Lukkhe on Prime Video? Let us know in the comments below!
Also Read: