Silence 2 Review: Even Manoj Bajpayee Can’t Redeem Lousy Whodunit

What Is the Story About?

ZEE5’s new original film ‘Silence 2: The Night Owl Bar Shootout’ is the sequel to its 2021 film, Silence: Can You Hear It? Multiple murders take place in a Mumbai bar, the result of an apparent shootout. However, intensive digging by ACP Avinash Verma (Manoj Bajpayee) and his team leads to the conclusion that there’s a more sinister reason behind the murders

Silence 2: The Night Owl Bar Shootout is written and directed by Aban Bharucha Deohans. It is produced by Zee Studios.

Performances?

Manoj Bajpayee is efficient as ever in his role of ACP Avinash Verma, idiosyncratic cop and head of the Special Crimes Unit. He salvages a poorly written character, but only just. Prachi Desai doesn’t have much to do as his subordinate, Inspector Sanjana Bhatia, except maybe, consolidate the goings-on for us, the audiences, with her overly expository dialogue.

Likewise with Sahil Vaid as Inspector Amit Chauhan and Vaquar Shaikh as Inspector Raj Gupta. All three stand around doing nothing mostly, except for participating in sloppy chase sequences for the sake of it. Dinker Sharma as Arjun Chouhan is saddled with an outlandish role and he ends up as a laughable caricature. Parul Gulati is loud and melodramatic in her limited role as Aarti Singh.

Analysis

Silence 2: The Night Owl Bar Shootout proves one thing, if nothing else—the resilience of ZEE5. After the dud that was ‘Silence: Can You Hear It’, it’s quite remarkable and resilient of ZEE5 to stick with the franchise and come out with a sequel to the first. Not that the sequel is any better, though. In fact, it is worse.

Silence: Can You Hear It was so run-of-the-mill and predictable that it could have given the good old saas-bahu TV soaps a run for their money. As if to compensate, the creators have made Silence 2: The Night Owl Bar Shootout so disjointed and unpredictable that it leaves you confused and bewildered by the time it ends.

For a murder mystery to work, it should have a few crucial elements in place—compelling characters, an interesting antagonist, and a believable story that manages to deliver convincing shocks and surprises, twists and turns, in a way that you never see ’em coming. Sadly, Silence 2 has none of the above.

In Silence 2, you can see the suspense from miles away—right from when ACP Avinash has a run-in with the killer quite early in the movie. Saying anything more will amount to dropping spoilers, so we’ll stop at that. The writers do throw ample red herrings along the way, casting suspicion on several prominent characters. But you can see them for what they are—again, from miles away.

What’s more, Silence 2 has the most bland, uninteresting and done-to-death central plot for a movie made in 2024. For a murder mystery to be simultaneously confusing and boring is quite something, but Silence 2 achieves the feat with aplomb.

To sum it up, Silence 2 is a movie that had no business being greenlit, let alone being made. Now that it’s made, there’s no compulsion for you to watch it. There, we’ve said it!,

Music and Other Departments?

The music in Silence 2 is forgettable—nothing to talk about much. Sandeep Kumar Sethy’s editing is efficient. The cinematography is just average, nothing extraordinary there.