Madaari sticks to a template similar to Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday, but doesn’t drum up the same urgency. The cops, led by a solemn-faced Jimmy Shergill, find themselves engaged in a wild goose chase for Nirmal, but there’s very little tension to this battle of wits. It doesn’t help that the supporting players are cardboard caricatures – from the bellowing news anchor to selfish politicians – and their acting is nothing to write home about. The film then rests squarely on the shoulders of its leading man to make up for its many shortcomings. Irrfan does the best he can with the given material, delivering moments of great poignancy while resisting the temptation to showboat. His breakdown scene in a hospital is especially heart-wrenching, and another one outside a government office where he reveals what he intends to do with a compensation cheque conveys the character’s pain without resorting to the usual tropes.It needed to be a film that was not overwhelmed by the fact that it was an Irrfan Khan starrer.Because a film like Madaari is a film that needs to be made. We need movies that will hold up a mirror to us and force us to look at the kind of society we are content to live in today. We need movies that will stop us from being frogs in a slowly boiling pot of water, absorbing the gently rising heat, not realising that, soon, it will kill us. We need movies that will awaken us, or shame us, so that we consciously refuse to succumb to a corrupt system. We need movies that will motivate us to teach our children the value of doing things the right way.
