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.
However, more than its social relevance, the highlight of Madaari is Irrfan’s awe-inspiring performance. His portrayal of a single father, torn between loss and revenge brings a lump to your throat. He moves you to tears, in that spectacularly heartbreaking hospital scene, which will go down in movie history as one of the finest tragic moments. You feel his anger, pain and guilt. Jimmy Sheirgill, once again plays the honest good cop and fits in perfectly. Tushar Dalvi is competent.
Madaari isn’t the first Hindi film to advocate a brand of vigilantism that borders on the fascist. Nor is it likely to be the last. But its point about the deadly distortions of democracy is terribly labored and sketchily articulated. Terms like instant justice, kangaroo court, media trial, a rule of law and ideal voter are bandied about. They do not eventually add up to much because the tale of loss and retribution that Madaari sets out to narrate is lost in a heap of cliches. Besides it’s distractingly loud background score, the film’s biggest drawback is the superficially defined character of the abducted boy ( Vishesh Bansal)
