A man at odds with the world and obsessed with lording over becomes a gangster one fine day because he sees crime as a shortcut to power. He makes his way up not by the dint of hard work but through the use of brutal force. He 'comes of age' by using a shovel to kill a man. The ruthless deed done, his acts turn more and more violent.
That, broadly, is the worn-out premise on which Maalik, written and directed by Pulkit (Bhakshak), rests. The overlong, ultra-violent crime drama revels in assiduously abiding by the rules of the game. It does not make even a token attempt to break new ground.
Maalik is a two-and-a-half-hour movie but one does not have to wait that long to figure out that it is happy to deal in cliches that leave us wondering what about the project would have made the makers believe that the story needed to be told.
The protagonist (Rajkummar Rao), an Allahabad University student-turned-gangster of the late 1980s who takes to a life of crime to avenge an indignity heaped on his farmer-father, beats his adversaries black and blue. In the process, the man subjects the audience to no less pain than he does to the fictional victims of his uncontrollable ire.
Maalik employs one of genre cinema's oldest narrative tics - an underdog who will stop at nothing to acquire the status of top dog flattens everything and everyone in his way. It, however, does nothing at all to pull the convention out from under a mound of stale twists.
It does worse. Its moral compass is all awry. The criminal is the hero. The men he has to contend with - a veteran encounter specialist with 98 kills to his name (Prosenjit Chatterjee), his unscrupulous mentor (Saurabh Shukla), an unctuous MLA (Swanand Kirkire) and a shady trader who considers him a threat to his business interests (Saurabh Sachdeva) - are as ethically decrepit as him. But none of them evolve beyond the stereotypes that they are.
For Rajkummar Rao, Maalik is a meaty assignment. He plunges headlong into the role. That is the only way the lead actor could have gone about his job here because there is little room for subtlety or depth in the plot, the treatment or the character. I might not have been born a maalik but I can certainly become one, Deepak, alias Maalik, asserts.
He lives up to his word and quickly becomes a man dreaded by everyone. His alarmed father (Rajendra Gupta) pleads with him to mend his ways. His wife (Manushi Chillar) does as much on more than one occasion. But Deepak is too drunk on power to see reason and bail out. Even his best pal and trusted lieutenant (Anshuman Pushkar) tries to drill some sense into him but to no avail.
Deepak has the trappings of an angry young man of an earlier era of Hindi cinema but minus the sort of context that would make his existence essential, if not always believable. Maalik is a tale of ambition, anger and betrayal but the writing does not have the requisite range.
Not only does the screenplay struggle to fully detail the socio-economic reasons behind his descent into hell, it also refuses to acknowledge that the choices that he makes are seriously questionable. It never stops glorifying Deepak's misdeeds.
Early in the film, Maalik, who operates with impunity, makes a portly policeman lick his spit before shooting him dead. Somebody reveals that the latter was an upper caste man. But the film isn't, as it transpires, interested in diving any deeper into the social dynamics in the making of a pitiless gangster.
It settles instead for projecting Deepak as a pure avenger, an outlaw who is a law unto himself. I have no idea what is right or wrong, says one character. Maalik asserts that he does not care if he is a hero or a villain and insists that he is the hero of his story. The script plays along and thus hollows the film out of psychological ambiguity.
The hero's desperate methods tell us next to nothing about the dispossession and deprivation that the earlier generations of his family might have faced at the hands of the power-wielding landed gentry and about how that history would have shaped Deepak's attitudes.
When there is a killing machine on a rampage, can a cussed cop be far behind? The man in uniform, like the film as a whole, is old wine in an old bottle. He is brought out of suspension and appointed the superintendent of Allahabad police and charged with the task of putting an end to Maalik's depredations. But he is subservient to the politician who, in turn, thinks nothing of grovelling before the gangster.
The cops are meant to be the pursues but they are always on the back foot. And the politician and the power broker he owes allegiance to are supposed to be in control of the levers of power. But this film is about Maalik. It is the crime lord who holds the balance, gets the best lines and never loses the upper hand.
Exasperatingly vacuous, the confrontations between the gang and those seeking to wipe out the armed and dangerous desperados are insufferably facile. In most crucial sequences, every intention is spelled out in more words than necessary before the physical action kicks in.
Way too much slips through the cracks in the time that elapses between talk and deed and robs the film of the heft that it seeks with the aid of its big action scenes, shootouts and hand-to-hand combats. Violence has rarely felt this gratuitous.
So, what do the actors do in such a scenario? There is a bunch of very accomplished ones in here. But the best they can do is go with the flow. It is a tough ask but they do not stop trying.
Maalik certainly isn't the lord of all it surveys.
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Rajkummar Rao, Manushi Chhillar, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Rajendra Gupta
