Directed by Pulkit | Written by Pulkit and Jyotsana Nath | 149 min | ▲▲▲ | Amazon Prime
If you go into this expecting a Hindi-language Scarface, you won’t be too far off — a lot less cocaine but more drama, romance, and impromptu musical interludes, the kind of thing you’d expect from a big-budget Indian movie — it reaches for an epic emotional scale with a delightful irreverence to what we consider genre norms in North America.
It’s about Maalik (the direct translation of that word from Hindi: Owner), otherwise known as Deepak (Rajkummar Rao, professionally handsome both bearded and clean-shaven), a self-styled badass who runs the town of Allahabad (aka Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh). When we meet him he’s in a Butch and Sundance standoff in 1990 with the police, then we flashback to two years before as he’s building his criminal empire — we see how he brutally kills a man with a shovel in public, thereby securing his reputation as a hard man.
This is much to the chagrin of his farm worker father and mother, and Shalini (Manushi Chhillar), his wife, who Maalik insists should live with his parents. She doesn’t get much to do but resist his sexual entreaties before she reveals she’s pregnant — a surprise since there’s no suggestion they ever get it on — which brings on a musical number and turns the crime drama into a romance for a few minutes as they sing together, “without you my very being ceases to be.”
Nobody becomes the de facto crime boss of a town without making a few enemies. On that list is Shankar Singh (Saurabh Shukla), a mentor-turned-antagonist, and a corrupt cop, Prabhu Das (Prosenjit Chatterjee), who complains, “I really don’t want to kill people, but it comes with the job.” This as he boasts of having had 98 “encounters” with people he’s presumably murdered. As far as villains go, these dudes will do.
On Maalik’s side is a cadre of dudes willing to go to the wall for him, particularly right hand man Badaun (Anshumaan Pushkar).
The notes of class struggle are seeded early on but are mostly forgotten in the scenes of bloody violence, both hand-to-hand and gun battles, which director Pulkit handles deftly in a variety of locations. The particulars of the political intrigue are a bit shaggy — Maalik’s got some of the cops on the payroll, but it’s a little unclear how he operates his business of trucks running in and out of town from the local factory, he’s never in the office, if he even has one. At one point he’s apparently running for public office, but we only see one scene of him campaigning and meeting the people, buying their votes — does he have a platform beyond, “Vote for me or I’ll murder your whole family”?
Maalik is broadly entertaining over its running time, which is bloated but well-paced. The violence is splashy and surprising enough to feel almost profound, but also impossible to take too seriously. The filmmaker has seen a lot of Sergio Leone, he knows how to photograph sweaty men’s faces, as well as those occasional dance numbers.
