Rajkummar, Crispy Dialogues Keep You awake In A Yawny Film Maalik

Starring: Rajkummar Rao; Prosenjit Chatterjee; Manushi Chhillar; Huma Qureshi; Saurabh Sachdeva; Saurabh Shukla.; Anshumaan Pushkar; Rajender Gupta; Baljinder Kaur.

Direction: Pulkit

To tick boxes for his CV, Rajkummar Rao enters the Don arena and does it with characteristic ease and habitual commitment to the character. In recent times, the bag is mixed while ‘Stree’ was a super hit, his performance in ‘Srikanth’ was tiring after four releases in the year that was. He makes a bold decision to trade the artistic path to one that is new to his comfort zone and to his image as an actor.

Director Pulkit decides to tell a story emanating from Allahabad and the scenario of mafia gangs and gang wars, dirt, dust and violence galore. A film that pans over a two and half hours is tragically mired in a meandering script that does no good to the narration, the viewer, or the cast.

Deepak (Rajkummar Rao) is from a lower middle class family living with dad Bindeshwar (Rajender Gupta) and mom Parvathi (Baljinder Kaur). His ambition is to become a big-time politician and he believes that the road to power is through the gun, himself a victim of such politics, at the hand of Chandra Shekhar (Saurabh Sachdeva), and Balhar Singh (Swanand Kirkire). He learns that being vengeful, being violent, being even fatalistically violent, is the only way to reach the higher echelons of power.

Deepak is enamoured of the local politician, Minister Shankar Singh (Saurabh Shukla). He suffers largely when the police inspector, alleged expert in encounters, Prabhu Das (Prosenjit Chatterjee), arrives at his home, threatens his parents and his wife Shalini (Manushi Chhillar). He now decides that he’s going to fight the police, and he’s also got to fight up or meet the challenges that are constantly thrown at him by Chandra Shekhar and by Balhar Singh.

His growth is meteoric, he grows high, maintains his high power rate, maintains a huge gang, his man Friday is Badaun (Anshumaan Pushkar). How the gang war escalates and how life comes full circle is what ‘Maalik’ is about. He also declares very early in the film: “What if you are not born a master, you can become one”. In fact, he says this at halftime. The tangential similarities to ‘Gangajal’ stop at the tangential points. They are not half as crisp. In fact, sometimes you get a feeling that the filmmaker has started off to make a ‘Sholay’ and has ended with ‘Khote Sikkay’.

The film is pathetically purposeless and most of the storytelling is episodic about somebody trying to kill somebody or the other. One-upmanship without enduring empathy for any of the characters, including Deepak, the protagonist, falls flat, and the audience is yawn-fully indifferent to whatever happens in the film.

There are some nice dialogues, very crisp ones. The story meanders. The acting sometimes is sublime, but the characters picked are pathetically miscast.

For example, as Badaun, Anshumaan Pushkar is just about average. Swanand Kirkire looks dazed. He looks like he’s a lotus eater. Huma Qureshi, of all people, you get Huma Qureshi to do an item number for you. Sad choice indeed. Saurabh Sachdeva, all his expressions are completely hidden in his unkept beard. As the wife, Shalini Pandey, is in the midst of conducting tutorial classes for a candidate on certain episodes that become a part of the story in the storytelling way. Prosenjit Chatterjee tries very hard, but the chocolate-faced Bengali actor doesn't fit into the role of being an encounter specialist.

All this notwithstanding, there is one performance that is almost towering over everybody else and everything else and that is Rajkummar Rao. As usual, he is very good. There are times you feel that the cost of the film was its undoing, including Rajkummar Rao, I would envisage Shahid Kapoor to do this film. But if your budgets are what they are and you wanted, surely Rajkummar Rao was brilliant. Arguably, he is the only actor among the main characters in the film who is worth spending money on. One other performance that definitely requires mention is Saurabh Shukla. Even a film like this, even an undefined role like the one he plays in the film will not affect his mastery of the craft. Saurabh Shukla is top rank. Apart from this, if you are a Rajkummar Rao fan, ‘Maalik’ is for you.

This is a film where the anti-hero has no empathy and has more and, do not forget, the anti-hero without empathy remains a villain. The film is very noisy, and even important, scenes like the surrender drama part of it could have been more dramatic, could have been tauter. Unfortunately, it is not.

For example, I can recall five decades ago when Sunil Dutt had the surrender scene in ‘Mujhe Jeene Do’ in a lovely performance with Waheeda Rehman. The surrender, which was the climax of Raj Kapoor’s ‘Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai’. The eras are different, maybe, but the surrender in this is so listless that you yawn in some of the most important scenes of the film. The only thing that keeps it going and keeps it going well to some extent is Rajkummar Rao. If you are not a Rajkummar Rao fan, give this film a miss.