General Dyer stutters, switches between languages and gets a moment or two of charm. That's according to Filmfare's review of The Revolutionaries, Nikkhil Advani's new eight-part series streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and it's the detail that sums up everything the review finds wrong with the show.

The series is based on Sanjeev Sanyal's book Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom. It tracks a chapter of the freedom movement that rarely makes it to mainstream screens: the 1912 attempt on Viceroy Lord Hardinge's life, the Ghadar movement, the Komagata Maru episode, and the uprising planned for 1915. Real names, real networks, real stakes. Rash Behari Bose, Sachindranath Sanyal, Bagha Jatin, Kartar Singh Sarabha. People most audiences have never had a series built around.

Filmfare's review calls that material genuinely gripping and says the show's biggest failure is refusing to trust it. Instead, per the review, Advani stages this history like a spy thriller, complete with dramatic entrances, disguises, swelling music, choreography that looks lifted from a Bhansali production, and action beats out of a Rohit Shetty film.

The casting problem

Bhuvan Bam plays Rash Behari Bose. Rohit Saraf plays Sachindranath Sanyal. Pratibha Ranta plays Pratibha Lahiri. Gurfateh Pirzada plays Bagha Jatin. The review singles out the first two as miscast, with Bam in particular described as stuck between a performance and a series of costume changes rather than actually inhabiting the danger of an underground revolutionary's life.

Pratibha Ranta comes off better in intent than execution, the review says. Bringing a woman revolutionary into the centre of this story is a real gap being filled, since women's role in the freedom struggle rarely gets this kind of screen time. But the review argues Ranta's character is written as a mouthpiece for present-day feminist talking points rather than a person, and her romantic track with Saraf's character doesn't land either.

Paoli Dam, by the review's account, is the one performer who seems to have understood what kind of series this needed to be. Restrained, serious, comfortable in the period without straining for attention.

The Dyer question

The most pointed criticism in the review is reserved for how the show handles Lt Colonel Dyer, the officer who would go on to order the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Here, he's shown with shades of humanity and even likability. The review doesn't dispute that historical villains can have grey areas. But it argues that at a moment when the series should be interrogating what colonial power actually looked like, softening its most notorious enforcer reads as an odd choice rather than a bold one.

What the review does credit The Revolutionaries with is visibility. It puts names on screen that Indian audiences mostly know as textbook footnotes, and it makes clear the freedom struggle was messier, more international and more dangerous than the version most people were taught.

Whether that's enough to carry eight episodes past a treatment the review calls glossy and theatrical is the question the show now has to answer with viewers, not critics. The Revolutionaries is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.