Not upto the mark,,not even an inch. Review on Madaari

Madaari begins with Irrfan Khan’s voiceover sonorously telling us a story about the struggle between a baaz(a hawk) and a chooza(chick). It sounds real, he says, but not as good — if in the end the hawk tramples over the chick. However, the same story would feel good but unreal with a different end, one in which the chick gets the better of the hawk.

Nishikant Kamat’s Madaari is a familiar tale of the chick aka common man’s fight against the hawk of a corrupt system — the politicians, bureaucrats, administration et al — that is seen as the cause for every problem facing the nation, be it inflation, unemployment or water crisis. It is, yet another one of the new age vigilante genre of films that articulates the frustration and cynicism deep-seated in the middle-class Indian psyche. The resemblance to A Wednesday, in so far as the larger arc is concerned, is uncanny and unmistakable. There the common man played by Naseeruddin Shah plants bombs to fight terrorists, here Khan kidnaps the home minister’s son to take a unique revenge for his own son’s death and to get the better of politicians, and, as in both the films, the narrative is all about the cat and mouse game, about how the cops(Anupam Kher there, Jimmy Sheirgill here) eventually nab the man but not before he has addressed the nation, spoken his mind, all in an effort to try and wake up the sleeping citizens.

Perhaps we, the viewers are ourselves tired of the many problems or may be the film itself is just plain old tired story-telling that raises no new questions. Madaari is loud and frenzied but doesn’t get persuasive, provocative or rousing. Perhaps a fresh, untold perspective would have helped than an obvious one. The preachy end doesn’t help either be it the talk about a government that exists only for corruption or the citizenry torn apart by the caste-class divides. All this plays out in the midst of a sensation-seeking media circus, a worn out leitmotif now in film after film. Been there, seen that, now what?

CAST-IRRFAN KHAN, jimmy shergill, vishesh bansal