'Maalik' Movie Review: Rajkummar Rao is Trapped in a Stale Gangster Saga

Maalik opens with a shootout in 1990, Allahabad. A dacoit-like gangster named Deepak (Rajkummar Rao), a.k.a Maalik (“owner”), is wounded and bullet-riddled. The police have surrounded the hideout. The Bengali superintendent (Prosenjit Chatterjee) cracks a movie joke on the loudspeaker while telling him to surrender. Maalik shoots back through the window. The film then rewinds to a few years ago, starting in earnest to show how Maalik reaches this moment. It’s a narrative older than time. You’d think that if something evokes memories of Satya, Agneepath, Vaastav, Sarkar and every other popular mafia-origins movie, it must be a solid contender. But the opposite is true here: Maalik feels like a childhood film-making wish being fulfilled — an all-you-can-eat genre buffet assembled from scraps of classics — rather than an inventive or original shot in the dark.

It might be the first foray into Bollywood hypermasculinity and violence for its actor and director, but even the protagonist’s beard and shades look derived. He’s such a Pushpa-coded tiger that he, too, becomes a sweet pussycat when besotted by his wife. Even the predictability is predictable: when a woman gets too much screentime suddenly, it can mean only one thing. Don’t make me spell it out. What’s depressing is that the film could circle back to the opening shootout at any point after the 20-minute mark — once the SP is introduced — and it wouldn’t make an iota of difference. The story would still be the same. The journey would have the same impact. Unfortunately, Maalik takes nearly 150 minutes.

When a movie fails to engage at a fundamental level, you start finding different reasons to fault it. For instance, there’s no reason for Maalik to be a period drama, other than the fact that a contemporary portrayal of Uttar Pradesh might ruffle feathers. It also allows the characters to deliver massy dialogue, walk and smoke in slow-mo, and then attribute it to Amitabh Bachchan’s big-screen swagger. Rule of thumb: when in doubt, blame the 1970s. They have no grounds to be angry young men themselves, unless one takes into account their frustration of being stuck in a story full of old-school cliches. The rise can be seen from outer space: Clean-shaven Deepak becomes a blood-thirsty Maalik after a kingmaker’s goon almost kills his poor-farmer dad. His murder of the goon is stretched out with the sort of gore that could’ve been an audiobook.

The newly-masculine anti-hero’s fight is supposed to be against injustice and corruption, but he becomes the very kingmaker that drove him off the edge. His next rampage happens once a loved one is killed — no prizes for guessing who — because he doesn’t bother escorting the person home. Men will be men, I suppose. In between, there’s an unnecessary item song, an unnecessary romantic ballad, and a horde of baddies — the smug SP, the wise mentor (Saurabh Shukla), an anxious MLA (Swanand Kirkire), a local rival (a hammy Saurabh Sachdeva) — scheming to get rid of Maalik. Of this accomplished but wasted supporting cast, Anshumaan Pushkar (best known as ‘Gauri Bhaiya’ from 12th Fail) plays Maalik’s loyal friend, whose reaction shots (like Nana Patekar’s in Rajneeti) have more screentime than Superman in Superman. The conceit is so obvious that it’d be perverse if all those shots didn’t amount to him being a traitor.

The film also has this annoying habit of several others in the genre. It’s so busy grandstanding that it has no time for common sense. Like how everyone elaborately plots to hunt down Maalik and his gang when he was having lunch with them minutes ago. He walks in and out of homes, threatens and leaves, and nobody thinks that finishing him off is a good idea? Is there some kind of gentleman’s agreement I’m not aware of? Every time a character has an opportunity to shoot someone, they find an excuse to get shot instead. When the mentor delivers a speech at a university in a flashback within a flashback, the metaphor he uses — a red balloon floating into the sky — is so long-winding that a background score starts midway through. The action set pieces have the same problem; they seem to lose their train of thought, like a sentence that begins with a flourish but forgets how to continue.

Rajkummar Rao throws his hat into the action-hero ring as Maalik. He’s a shapeless actor, so he manages to infuse details into the character that the writing cannot. For instance, Deepak’s transformation is not all that random in Rao’s hands; he’s done so many coming-of-age, small-town dramedies over the years that it almost feels like Deepak was waiting for a crisis to jolt him out of his drifter ways. Once his father is attacked, he gets the excuse to unleash his true self — you can tell that he’s watched enough movies to understand that his aura has to be performative. Even when he chooses to turn himself in once his wife is pregnant, it’s like Maalik is doing so to evade the responsibility of being a new father. Good performers invite you to read too much into, or intellectualise, their craft.

But Rao’s image also softens the idea of Maalik in moments where he becomes a doting husband; the goofy romcom grin yanks us out of the world. The intensity dims when the camera meets him at eye level. This isn’t to say the role required the critic-proof wattage of a superstar. It’s just that the one-note film paints him into a corner, where the only way out is to be unnatural or say something audacious. The result is a Maalik torn between identities and fictions. Formula done well is rare these days. But this film is a case of formula done to death — a death that would simply not happen if it depended on one of the bullets shot in this film. It’s never a good sign when a viewer begins to cheer for a gun to find its mark.