Title: Special Ops 2
Directors: Neeraj Pandey, Shivam Nair
Cast: Kay Kay Menon, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Prakash Raj, Saiyami Kher, Revathi Pillai, Karan Tacker, and others
Where: Streaming on JioHotstar
Rating: ***1/2
In its third season, Special Ops 2 (dubbed Operation Pixel) charges into high-stakes espionage with guns blazing and codes- cracking. At the centre is Kay Kay Menon’s Himmat Singh—a brooding, methodical patriot who doesn’t leap off rooftops but orchestrates surgical missions across continents while quietly wrestling with emotional scars and a system that often fails him.
This time, the series is propelled by a ticking-clock premise: a RAW agent, Vinod Shekhawat—played with quiet intensity by Tota Roy Chowdhury—is assassinated; a leading scientist, Dr. Piyush Bhargav—played with understated gravitas by Arif Zakaria—is kidnapped within six hours; and a disgruntled ex-mentor threatens to blast the city’s financial district. One could argue the writers have thrown the entire espionage buffet at us.
The show’s ambition is admirable. Shot across a dizzying spread of locations—Budapest, Istanbul, Delhi, Rawalpindi, Dominica Island (where espionage oddly begins to resemble a resort holiday)—the series is technically flawless. Directors of photography Dimo Popov and Arvind Singh turn the globe into a glossy postcard, and the aerial shots are so lush you half expect a luxury cruise ad to pop in. The editing is sharp, the sound design immersive, and the action choreography, for the most part, avoids the Bollywood bravado trap.
But the storytelling? That’s where the cracks begin to show. For a spy thriller, the series leans heavily on exposition. Characters spend far too much time telling us what’s happening before the visuals even get a chance. It’s as if the writers didn’t trust their frames to do the talking. Every other scene is a debriefing, and soon the audience begins to feel like the RAW trainee instead of a spectator. Suspense is steadily replaced by information overload.
Still, it’s Kay Kay Menon who anchors the show—stoic, subtly disillusioned, yet unshakable. His quiet intensity lends weight to both the mission and the man. Watching him battle enemies while unraveling within adds poignancy. However, the relationship with his daughter Pari (Revati Pillai) is underexplored—their scenes hint at deeper emotional struggles, but the narrative rarely develops their dynamic beyond surface interactions, leaving their arc feeling incomplete and their resolution abrupt.