Mardaani 3, Review: Manly Mardaani v/s Beggar Maharani and Virus Villainy
Mardaani 3, Review: Manly Mardaani v/s Beggar Maharani and Virus Villainy
A full 14 years after Mrs. Manly wiped out a human trafficking gang, we have her history repeating itself, with child-trafficking still the premise. In between, we had Mardaani 2, in 2019, wherein Shivani Shivaji Roy, alias Mardaani (manly), went after a psychopath rapist and serial killer. Both films starred Rani Mukerji in the lead and were produced by hubby, Aditya Chopra, under his YashRaj Films banner, and both had moderate success at the box office. The never say die duo have come-up with part 3 of the crime thriller franchise, Mardaani 3, seven years after Mardaani 2. Rani is now 48 years-old, and the gambit of presenting her as a senior police officer pays off, as far as the casting goes. Mardaani 3 has similarities to Mardaani 1, though not enough horse-power to captivate audiences.
Two young girls are abducted while playing in a field, and Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Shivani Shivaji Roy, of Mumbai, is put on the case, though the incident occurred in Bulandshaher, some 1,400 kms from Mumbai. It turns out that one of the girls, aged 8-9, is the daughter of an Indian Ambassador, who has served as a diplomat in some countries. The other girl, aged about 5-6, is the daughter of the statesman’s gardener. Amma, a female Don, runs a kidnapping and forced-into-beggary operation, on a massive scale, and the two men who were sent for the abduction, were working on Amma’s orders. But Amma is interested only in the younger girl, and the second girl was picked up by the abductors just because she happened to be around. On Shivani’s advice, the girl’s parents appear on TV and offer a Rs. 2 crore reward to the kidnappers, if they return the girl. Shivani makes an elaborate plan to trap the kidnappers when they come to collect the ransom, at a railway station. However, three of the four manage to get away, but a fourth is apprehended. Moreover, a junior police-woman, Fatima, manages to take a good look at the fleeing gangsters, enough to identify them later. even as she is injured while trying to stop them.
The captured man is interrogated, and, under torture, reveals that one of the gang members is an addict at card-gambling. After raiding a gambling den, and killing the kidnappers, the police trace the abduction to Amma, and also come to know of one Ramanujam, who is USA-returned stock-market player, with oodles of accumulated wealth. He runs a child welfare home, called Treta Trust, for children who have fallen prey to gangs that abduct them, maim them and push them into begging. Ramanujam has helped the police in the past, by helping apprehend several such gangs, but Amma’s gang continues to operate. Shivani gets hot on the trail of Amma, and confronts her, but Amma is defiant, and Shivani is unable to pin any charges against her. Shivani spends most of her time on the job, and her mildly protesting husband, Dr. Bikram Roy, has reconciled to this fact. One day, he comes home, and finds Shivani asleep in their bed. As soon as he tucks himself in, he finds that the person he thought was Shivani is actually Amma.
(A word on the word, ‘Treta’: Treta Yug is the second of the four yugs (cosmic ages) in Hindu mythology, lasting 1,296,000 years. The word is derived from ‘tre’ or ‘tri’, which stand for three. This span of time is also known as the Age of Three, or the Silver Age. It follows Satya Yuga and precedes Dvapara Yuga, representing a time when morality (Dharma) declined to three-quarters, and Lord Vishnu appeared as Vaman, Parashuram, and Ram. Treta Yug is the era in which the events of the epic Ramayana occurred, featuring the life of Lord Rama).
There is little to distinguish Mardaani 3 from a spate of films addressing the despicable evil of children being abducted, and sold, to work as prostitutes, or beggars, and, sometimes, as slave labour. But, to its credit, the screenplay by Aayush Gupta, Deepak Kingrani and Baljeet Singh Marwah weaves in a parallel plot of children used in guinea pigs to create vaccines for cervical cancer, in the hope of marketing the magic medicine at astronomical prices, and skimming the stock market, with the help of foreign collaborators. Unfortunately, this parallel plot does not add to the thrill or excitement. It merely helps shift the action from India to SriLanka, where the children are given the deadly injections and a lab is operated by the brainiac-maniac Amma ally, who she calls ‘Navaab Saahab’ (for no particular reason). Scenes inside the lab are shot superficially, and it is never explained how Mr. Disease Diabolic could set-up such a centre in the country. Nevertheless, at times, you feel that the virus angle would work better as another, entirely different film.
How often have we seen a police officer being taken off a case because he/she has been unable to gather solid evidence against hardened criminals? How many times have we seen such officers suspended and their weapons taken back by superior officers, (in this case, by the Director General of Police, DGP), only to form a possé of their own, with former colleagues, and friends, who are willing to risk their lives, working without the back-up of the official executive machinery, and go after the baddies? How frequently have we had villains and vamps mock the ‘vardee’ (uniform) worn by those on the right side of the law, and the dedicated officers declaring that they wear it with pride?
Give the writers due credit for avoiding tropes like having the higher-up(s) in the police/government being hand-in-glove with the ungodly, and for including Muslim characters on both sides of the law. But where did the figure of 80,000 come from, when Shivani bemoans that there are only so many police persons? Where? In which state? AI tells us that India has 2.1 million persons working in the various arms of the police. It takes Amma to tell Shivani that almost all the police personnel in her area of operation are on the take. Wouldn’t Shivani be already aware of this malaise? Yes, we have not seen many female Dons operating Operation Baby Beggar, and the character of Amma, though not shaped with perfection, impresses us. On the other hand, Navaab Saahab does not strike us as a man evoking terror, and a villain to remember. Even his cold-hearted, merciless suffocation of a little girl, by clasping his palm over her mouth and choking her to death, is not enough to paint him as a deeply hated dastard.
A police-person’s better-half having little or no time for him is always a given in such stories, and Mardaani 3 follows suit. Why is he left alive, after being brought close to being dead, by Amma, is something we can keep wondering about. The writers, and director Abhiraj Minawala, have managed to show Shivani as a person with high IQ, often more intelligent than some of her (male) colleagues, while conducting the investigations, seeing more in the forensic laboratory report than what is written, what a doll, propped against a tree in the countryside, connotes, and pointing out to them that the information they believe will take weeks or months can actually be obtained in a matter of days. Action and thrills are all there, but they never reach the pulsating or the edge-of-your-seat stage. Stage. The climax is a let-down, with the tame elimination of the mother-of-all-evils, Amma, and the Virulent Virus Vaccinator being given a dose of his own medicine.
From the teams of Nagesh Kukunoor to Salman Khan to YashRaj Films, Abhiraj has come a long way. His debut film, Loveyatri: A Journey of Love (2018), a romantic comedy produced by Salman Khan and inspired by the 2006 Telugu film Devadasu, did not make waves, but YashRaj reposed enough faith in him to offer him Mardaani 3. Not having seen Loveyatri, I cannot comment on the progress (or, god forbid, regress) of his directorial skills, but Mardaani 3 is just about par. It’s genre film that conforms to the genre, but does not rise significantly higher than the benchmarks set by some other, memorable films of the genre.
It is obvious that producer Aditya Chopra and wife Rani Mukerji are continuing to project the image of the diminutive Rani as an action heroine. She acquits herself well, as a fully confident performer, with clear focus. Rani’s ‘unusual’ voice is never an impediment, considering she is playing a police-woman here, and not a glam Rani (queen). But there are no ‘wow’ moments. The climax, in which she gives a continuous iron chain lashing to the cornered kingpin, could have been a showcase, had it been better written and better directed, but peters out into a mere going through the motions. As her husband, Jisshu Sengupta, has very little screen time and is not asked to do much, except give a touch of his native Bengali accent to the character. As the ruthless antagonists, Mallika Prasad (Amma) and Prajesh Kashyap (Ramanujam, alias Navaab Saahab) fall just short of the steely ice presence of Tahir Raj Bhasin in Mardaani 1. Mallika, well known in Kannada films, has a master's in ‘performance making’ from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a post-graduation from the National School of Drama, while not much is known about Prajesh. Janki Bodiwala’s character, Fatima Anwar, though a minor one, is well written and well-enacted. Shashank Shende as Aslam, the drunkard, does a good job. Jaipreet Singh makes a dignified DGP.
John Stewart Eduri’s background music score does not disappoint. It very rarely does. Polish director and cinematographer Artur Zurawski (Bhoomi, Sultan), who won a Filmfare Award nomination for Mardaani 1, is back behind the camera in Mardaani 3. I don’t think this is award material, but it is definitely state-of-the-art. While there is nothing wrong at all with employing the services of foreign talent, and it is the producer’s choice, we do have a pool of the best in the world, of our own. At 2 hours and 9 minutes, Mardaani 3 is kept at just about the right length by editor Yasha Ramchandani. However, it suffers from an unnecessarily extended climax. With scenes like the chopping of hands of little children and bodies being burnt in an in-house crematorium (furnace), the film is rightly certified for exhibition to Adults Only.
Rating: **
Trailer: https://youtu.be/V4TJKSEftkU
