Last Updated:May 15, 2026, 01:58 IST

Inspector Avinash Season 2 follows Avinash Mishra battling a weapons cartel and his sons murder case, strong performances and pace offset uneven writing and technical flaws

Randeep Hooda as Inspector Avinash Season 2.

Inspector Avinash Season 2 understands exactly the kind of world it wants to exist in. This is not a restrained or layered crime drama trying to dissect morality and policing with sophistication. It is loud, dramatic, filled with gang wars, political conspiracies and encounter specialists who carry the weight of entire operations on their shoulders. The series leans heavily into that massy, old-school style of storytelling and while the execution often turns uneven, it still manages to remain somehow l engaging.

The new season follows STF officer Avinash Mishra (Randeep Hooda), whose encounter cases, suspensions and political pressure continue to define his career as he takes on an expanding weapons cartel connected to crime lord Sheikh (Amit Sial) and the dangerous Devikant Trivedi (Abhimanyu Singh). But beyond the larger conflict involving gang rivalries and corruption within the system, the season also pushes Avinash into personal territory. His son Varun is accused of murdering a classmate who had allegedly been bullying him, forcing Avinash to confront a crisis that no encounter operation can solve.

The show becomes far more interesting whenever it shifts focus from action to internal distrust within the police system. Officers with questionable loyalties, political interference and hidden agendas create a tension that works better than some of the louder action stretches. The expanding network of criminals and informers also keeps the narrative moving, even if the series occasionally overloads itself with too many tracks and side characters at once. Some storylines begin with promise but are quickly abandoned as the show rushes towards the next operation or conspiracy.

Randeep Hooda remains the strongest part of the series. He plays Avinash with enough roughness and emotional fatigue to make the character believable even when the writing fails him. Hooda understands that Avinash works best not as a heroic fantasy but as a cop slowly wearing himself down in a broken system. Amit Sial brings menace to Sheikh, while Abhimanyu Singh adds unpredictability and eccentricity to Devikant Trivedi. Rajneesh Duggal leaves an impression as Ahlawat and Urvashi Rautela is surprisingly sincere in some of the season’s emotional moments. A scene where her character Poonam decides to leave Avinash’s house with Varun in the middle of the night after their son’s arrest is among the few moments where the emotional conflict genuinely lands.

Still, the writing frequently slips into familiar crime-drama clichés. Several dialogues feel recycled from older North Indian gangster stories, functioning in the moment without leaving much impact. A few operations, especially one involving gangster Sachin Pahadi, become unintentionally exaggerated and chaotic instead of tense. The series also falls back on familiar imagery of gangsters sitting in smoky rooms with dancers while female characters connected to the criminal world are mostly reduced to informers and narrative tools.

The technical inconsistencies become distracting too. Certain dubbing portions and abrupt audio transitions make a few scenes feel awkwardly assembled. Yet the cinematography captures the dusty, volatile atmosphere of 1990s Uttar Pradesh well. Background score is a big win too

Inspector Avinash Season 2 may not reinvent the cop-thriller genre, but it never loses sight of the audience it is trying to entertain. It is messy, dramatic, occasionally repetitive, but also certainly watchable. For viewers who enjoy gritty crime sagas driven more by momentum and atmosphere than subtle storytelling, the series delivers enough to keep the binge going.