The story is propulsive and involves a range of intriguing and shady characters: the moment he arrives, Lin meets Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), a devoted and charming guide who will become his best friend he falls in love with Karla (Antonia Desplat), a French woman mixed up in all sorts of trouble before long he is doing deals with local gangster Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig) and he attracts unwanted journalistic attention when he becomes a kind of doctor for the locals. There’s an unnerving, almost psychopathic blankness to Hunnam’s Lin, who is a virtuous character in an assortment of Indian villains – dangerous white saviour territory out of which Shantaram never really digs itself.Ĭharlie Hunnam in ‘Shantaram’. Unfortunately, neither are worth writing home from Mumbai about. Consequently, Shantaram is only ever as good as Hunnam’s accent and acting. It’s Australian, you soon realise, and you try to tune your ear accordingly.
Rather than keeping his head down, however, Lin – the fake name the protagonist adopts, along with his passport – is embroiled in violence and gang warfare.Īs soon as Hunnam’s voiceover begins and you can’t tell which accent he’s speaking in, we’re off to a shaky start. Arguably an autobiography, the book is about a man who commits armed robberies to fund a heroin addiction and then, having escaped prison in Australia, flees to Mumbai to start afresh. Shantaram, which stars Charlie Hunnam in its lead role, is the Apple TV+ adaptation of the novel of the same name by Gregory David Roberts. It’s like scaling Everest and then seeing a sign at the very peak that says, ‘Oops – nearly there.’
There’s more TV coming – probably of about the same length as the TV you’ve just seen. Not an original complaint, necessarily, but why is everything so long these days? At the end of Shantaram – after 11 hours of lovingly-crafted but painstakingly slow television – we learn that this isn’t even the end of the story we’ve spent half a day watching.
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