MARDAANI 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 and beautiful 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.

Rani carries the film singlehandedly and her work in the action scenes is creditable. Her dialogue delivery and mastery of the Mumbai slang are also applause-worthy, though she gets loud at times. The film gets over-the-top towards the finale and the ending is sort of stereotypical and over-dramatic, with a message and some facts about the child trafficking trade thrown on to the screen. India is the ‘hub’ of this trade, we are told.

The young villain actor, Tahir Bhasin seems to be a natural and plays his role with some style and is a good foil to the vibrant Rani. There are a plethora of young female actors playing the roles of the girls abducted into the sex trade and there are some explicit visuals of these young women as they are inducted into the business. Mardaani rightly comes with an A certificate and there are quite a few scenes with skin show, violence and substance abuse.

Artur Zurawski takes care of the visuals and his treatment is raw and gritty, to suit the film’s theme. Director Pradeep Sarkar doesn’t resort to needless songs save the spirited climax number, and the background score by Julius Packiam befits the serious, tense nature of the film.

Pradeep also shows his intelligence in the scenes when Rani figures out the villain’s abode and decides to directly come to his place, risking her life. The film runs for lesser than 2 hours and never for a moment does the pace dip. Though the screenplay is linear and doesn’t feature any extra-ordinary moments, our eyes are fixed on the screen and on Rani. But the preachy and typically cinematic ending sort of blunts the final impact.

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.

PS – Women would like the film more