The tough woman cop at it again. Review on Mardaani 2

Rani Mukherjee has largely played the love interest kinda roles throughout her career and I don't need to name them, barring a few exceptions such as Raja Ki Aayegi Baraat(1997) or Mehndi(1998) in the early years of her career where such played a head strong women who goes against the odds of society to provide justice to her victimized self or others.Another set of exceptions include Mardaani(2014) where she played a rough & tough, ruthless & manly cop for the very first time in an avatar never seen before, involving her beating the hell out of hardened rapists & criminals and her latest venture, a sequel or extension of the first version encountering a ruthless psychopathic rapist & murderer who knows no boundaries and would leap to any extent to achieve his wicked goals.

Plot:-

The scene opens at a fare in Kota, Rajasthan where a young guy limping with a mask on & introducing himself as Sunny(Vishal Jethwa)to the audience sets his eyes on a young girl named Latika engaged in a heated argument with her boyfriend before leaving the scene. Her boyfriend too leaves the scene & bumps into Sunny, where Sunny manages to steal his mobile phone & then uses his nefarious intentions to break open a car parked at the fare & dupes Latika into believing that her boyfriend met with an accident & is rushed to the General Hospital.Latika falls for the trap, only too late to realise the intention of the stranger, where she is raped & murdered by Sunny at an unknown location.

The news of the chilling rape & murder horrifies the public with ACP Shivani Shivaji Roy(Rani Mukherjee), at a press conference, promises to nab the criminal.Sunny overhears this on television whilst being given a supari by politician Govind Mishra to murder journalist Kamal Parihar, who could potentially cause havoc in Mishra's political career.Sunny then decides to challenge Shivani by first sneeking into her home & scribbling with her lipstick on the mirror as a warning to her.He then steals one of the sarees from her cupboard & then carries forward with his mission of murdering the journalist while making it appear as a suicide, while deceitfully pretending to be a woman who faints outside his house.

A cat and mouse chase begins with Sunny challenging Shivani and the cops after raping & traumatising another woman who had an altercation with him.Shivani does manage to get hold of him but he escapes after a tough fight. Later, Govind Mishra realises that Sunny is mentally unstable and severes ties with him, but Sunny is determined to avenge that by kidnapping his granddaughter & straps a bomb to her & blackmails Mishra to ask Shivani to apologize to Sunny on national television. Shivani refuses but she & her team manage to save his granddaughter in the nick of time.

Now, one can only realise the final outcome with Sunny on his last mission to kidnap a female politican named Sunanda Chaudhary after being bribed by her male counterpart in doing so.He does get successful by nabbing her at a Diwali celebration & takes her to a location & brutally assaults her and another young girl of a family .Shivani gets to the location but is struck unconscious by him & he tortures her too but Shivani manages to distract him by recollecting how he helped his father murder her mother who was an outspoken woman, which explained Sunny's hatred towards other brave & outgoing women.They manage to hurl paint on him with the last scene showing Shivani & the other women using Sunny's belt to beat him up in the presence of the crowd in the locality.

Direction/Performances:-

This film marks the directorial debut of Gopi Puthran, who worked as a screenwriter and dialogue writer with films such as Mardaani(2014) & Lafangey Parindey(2010), just to name a few. But nevertheless, he did a magnificient job of keeping the narrative gripped to an extent that one would never experience a dull moment in the show. He managed to swiftly take the storyline from a gruesome rape & murder of a young girl, to the cat & mouse chase of Shivani Shivaji Roy with her team to nab the Psychopath criminal, to the upheavels in Shivani's career owing to her challenging her superiors & powerful politicians, and finally in providing justice.

Coming to the performances, Rani Mukherjee rocked the show with her macho approach to the role of a tough, no nonsense woman cop on the hunt for a vicious criminal. However, as opposed to the first edition, according to me, there was a lesser or nil dose of overacting and more of'to the point' performance until the end.

The show stealer in the movie would be none other than debutant newcomer Vishal Jethwa in the role of Sunny, a hardened criminal having ordinary looks but a psychopathic mind coupled with sinister agendas. He had the daring to essay a role where he not only brutally rapes & murders young girls and his opponents, but also has the nerve to challenge the Superintendent of Police(SP) and kidnap & torture an aspiring female politician, all of which seems to be done with great ease, although the manner in which it was portrayed seemed absolutely unrealistic & impossible in real life to carry on.

There were other performances such as Prasanna Ketkar essaying the role of a powerful politician, Govind Mishra or Anurag Sharma playing the role of the journalist Kamal Parihar who was later murdered, Shruti Bapna as Inspector Bharti Angare, Sumit Nijhawan as DSP Brij Shekhawat, or the many other minor ones, all of which were portrayed well, in accordance with the script.

Overview:-

Mardaani 2 is a crime thriller that would keep the viewer hooked to their seat from the first scene till the very end. It would very like promise the viewer to have a deep seated hatred towards the antagonist to ensure the right justice to be served, while feeling compassion for the victims of a ruthless criminal.But however, in the case of this plot, I felt that the supposed justice served in the end was too little or lenient for such a gruesome and violent rapist and murderer.However, there were no songs or item numbers in this film, not one! This reminded me of one of the earlier films I had seen, Robot 2(2018), starring Rajnikanth, which too did not have any songs. This seems to be a welcome change in Bollywood, which otherwise, as we all are fully aware, has a pletheora of songs in each movie, either romantic singles or catchy item numbers which turn chartbusters even before a film is released.

But in the end, such films do manage to convey a social message about the reality of the menace of hate crimes & oppression against women in our country which has been the norm for quite a while until recently, where thanks to the determined acts of the Media, Government & the state machinery, NGO's etc, large scale awareness of this situation has been created.

Owing to the gruesomeness of certain scenes & the evil nefarious agenda of the primary antagonist, it is best advised to watch the movie with friends rather than family.