Mardani: Movie Review
Seems like it is the season of cop flicks in Bollywood. Last week, it was Singham Returns and this week it is Mardaani with Rani Mukerji in the lead role.
With a female lead on board, the director Pradeep Sarkar has opted for an expected theme, surrounding child trafficking and the sex trade. Rani plays Shivani Shivaji Roy, a bold senior inspector in the Mumbai crime branch who springs into action when a girl child she knows, goes missing. She tracks down the villains in Delhi and vanquishes them, along expected lines.
You will find Rani in all together a different avatar, wherein she is seen as a crime branch officer dealing with the case of Child Trafficking and busting the racket working behind this menace found in the society. In India wherein you witness more than 40,000 kids being abducted and smuggled every year, making such movie to create awareness about this issue and empowering the women in our society is really a good idea. Indeed the statistics of child trafficking in India is very much alarming wherein you would find a girl child missing every eight minute.
The script of the movie seems to be straight and seems very much realistic in an Indian society wherein we all live having so many cases of child trafficking. The cop has her little niece called Meera to whom the lady cop is very much protective. Another teenager called Pyari seen in the movie is just like a daughter to Rani, who is unfortunately kidnapped by the trafficking mafia, who is then smuggled to another city. Rani takes up this life changing case in her hand and is seen taking a long and wild chase to nab the criminal behind this abduction. The mafia kingpin Walt simply calls this lady inspector inquiring as to what would be her price in order to leave the case.
Mardani seems as real as any other male actor playing the role. Rani Mukerji as Shivani Sivaji Roy in Mardaani seems capable enough to shy away several other ‘Mard’ cops in Bollywood. She deserves an applause for attempting to portray a movie minus Bollywood’s trademark frills. Comments of the First Viewers of the film were great when we talked with the viewers out the theatres. Rani Mukherji is pitch perfect in the role of a super-cop that is rightly hued, far from the floss and swagger of Chulbul Pandey and Singham. There are no unnecessary twists and turns, convoluted flashbacks or, worse, forced item numbers in the end. Simple, straight screenplay. According to the source this movie will surely grab the success on Bollywood box office for coming week.
As far as performances of different characters, Rani has left no stone unturned to give her best in Mardani. In fact, she has even approached the ATS chief to find out some lady cops in Crime Branch Mumbai Police and thus invested lots of her time studying their lifestyle and ways they deal in their daily chores. Her efforts to replicate the real in the movie were successful to bring out the best of her performances.
Alas, Mardaani works mainly because of its female protagonist (played with a lot of energy and spunk by Rani). Otherwise, it is a typically straightforward movie about a cop on a mission.
But still, the film is a tribute to the sheer strength which every woman possess and scores well on that point. Certainly a must watch!
