Shobhaa De walked into Mirzapur: The Movie with zero history with the show. She walked out with a lot of opinions, and Rs 1,160 lighter.

In an Instagram Reel posted Thursday, the columnist said she'd never watched the Amazon Prime Video series before catching its theatrical spin-off, directed by Gurmeet Singh. The hype around the brand had her expecting something. What she got, in her words, was "what the hell was going on?"

"All I can say is the movie maybe should not have been made at all," De said. Not exactly the pull-quote a studio wants three weeks into a release, but there it is.

Her review wasn't a wipeout, though. She called Ravi Kishan's Babban Babua Yadav "just brilliant" and had nothing but praise for Ali Fazal's Guddu, describing the performance as "unbelievably good." Pankaj Tripathi didn't fare as well. De felt his Kaleen Bhaiya has calcified into a routine. "Mr. Tripathi playing Mr. Tripathi has become a bit too monotonous," she said, adding that the expressions and delivery haven't moved in years.

She also flagged a scene between Tripathi and Rasika Dugal's Beena Tripathi that clearly wasn't what she expected from someone she called "Mr. Goodie-Goodie." De described Dugal's character as a "Lady Macbeth" type, vampish and calculating, and seemed genuinely thrown that the film went there.

The rest of her complaints were about pacing and purpose. Violence "of every conceivable kind for no reason," a plot she felt "goes nowhere," and enough dead air that she nodded off for what she estimates was 15 minutes. She wasn't alone. Two women behind her, she says, were snoring through it too.

"Maybe, it's meant for men," De concluded. "It wasn't meant for me."

The caption on her post got granular about the outing itself. Rs 900 for the ticket. Rs 260 for bhelpuri. Close to four hours, she wrote, spent wondering why the film felt like a string of set pieces with no thread holding them together.

Mirzapur: The Movie opened in cinemas on September 4, bringing back the original cast almost entirely intact. Tripathi, Fazal, Dugal, Shweta Tripathi, Divyenndu, Harshita Gaur, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Rajesh Tailang all return, with Jeetendra Kumar and Abhishek Banerjee joining fresh. The show itself has run three seasons on Prime Video since 2018, and the fandom hasn't exactly cooled off.

De's take is one reaction among thousands flooding social media since the release, and the split is familiar to anyone who follows how franchise fatigue gets litigated online: loyalists defending the world, newcomers baffled by the noise. Whether her verdict changes how the film is talked about in its second and third weeks is a different question, one the box office numbers will answer faster than any review can.