11th Hour review: Tamannaah Bhatia can’t rescue this series

The makers of 11th Hour had promoted the corporate drama as a world-class show which will have Tamannaah Bhatia in yet another superlative performance. Touted to be the first big-budget Telugu web series, 11th Hour, however, fails at all levels to deliver on these promises.

Tamannaah plays Aratrika Reddy in the show, who is divorced and mother to a 6-year-old. While putting her son to bed, she narrates the story of Red Riding Hood to him. The story is quite significant because Aratrika is the proverbial Red Riding Hood who is surrounded on all sides of wolves in the garb of men. Her first enemy is her father, a wife-beater who believes only his son will be his worthy successor.

As things get tough, he is forced to make Aratrika the CEO of his company, which makes her the bête noire of the rival companies and their owners. Soon, we witness a news channel reporting on a Rs 10,000 crore scam done by Aratrika’s company, Aditya Group, and how she owes a loan to a bank and has only one day to repay it. Left alone in a man’s world, she has no choice but to rage a battle. This is where our confusion begins and the plot loses its hold.

As the series progresses, we meet different characters. The makers put some in context while we are supposed to understand the relevance of others all on our own. During one of the sequences, we see a glimpse of a debate around Rhea Chakraborty’s NCB case but the makers, like many other things, leave it hanging.

The only saving grace is that there are only eight episodes with duration kept under 30 minutes of each. It appears the makers were in a hurry to shoot the sequences and put the series out as they didn’t concentrate on minute things like lip-sync. There are scenes where Tamannaah’s dialogue and her lip movement didn’t match.

We fail to connect with Tamannaah and her character Aratrika as the character is kept half-baked. Sadly, she’s not convincing as a mother and it takes her seven episodes to make an impression as a businesswoman.

11th Hour is not Tamannaah’s best performance, but her co-star Arun Adith leaves an impression as Peter D’Cruz, Aratrika’s only well-wisher in the series.

The makers tried hard to make a series that stands at par with the content available on other OTT platforms. But the series, which is supposed to be one of Aha’s biggest shows, fails to match the expectations.

11th Hour had an open-ended climax, paving the way for a sequel. Our only hope is that it will be engaging and worth our time the second time round.