A novice thriller with B-movie thrills and spills
Director: Jaideep Chopra
Cast: Sumit Nijhawan, Mona Wasu, Pankaj Tripathi, Manav Kaushik, Manish Chaudhari, Zakir Hussain
Maazii opens with a whistling background tune and you feel it’s straight out of a Sergio Leone movie. The sound of it belongs in a western or a pulp fiction movie. In the first scene, actor Pankaj Tripathi playing a crazy gangster named Bhatiji, confesses raping and killing women to an inspector in a police station. This is a text book Quentin Tarantino opening. At this point you feel a rush. It’s as if, you’re going to watch a Hindi movie that will live up to Hollywood standards. And then normalcy kicks in. That brilliant flash of a start, with death enveloped in humour, gives way to the quintessential Indian movie cliché. Two gangsters participate in an item number with a presumable sex worker. The song is called Totta. Its effect is severely detrimental.
It is after this introductory phase that the movie changes its mood. It turns to its protagonist Tarun (Sumit Nijhawan) and his serene, uneventful life in Mussoorie. Tarun sells flowers and has a postcard family with a loving wife and a cute little daughter. Unfortunately, the gangsters decide to buy flowers at his shop. And during their excursion they randomly decide to rape a foreigner lady. Tarun comes to the rescue, killing the baddies off and turning into an unlikely hero. That’s where the film starts. But it quickly trades its humour for run-of-the-mill thrills. No one likes a movie that takes itself too seriously. Especially, when there are about 10 cinematic liberties in every scene. But that’s exactly what Maazii does. It relegates itself to B-movie territory. The hero needs sorry excuses to run around in a fancy jacket, get into fist fights and kill just about every person at free will.
That’s not all. Like a B grade film, Maazii even has a small on-screen cameo by the microphone. The mike just wiggles around the hero and heroine as they exchange heavy-duty emotional dialogue. A film like Maazii isn’t made with a lavish budget. You come to expect a raw-ish product. But action scenes in this film are downright amateurish. Kindergarten kids fight with more conviction. It doesn’t help that the leading man Sumit Nijhawan doesn’t have the requisite charisma of a big-screen hero.
The only take away from this modest film is the potential of its director Jaideep Chopra. He shows good vision for a first time filmmaker. His film serves up good thrills and spills and that opening is just out of the world. One hopes Jaideep will get better in his subsequent films.
If you like en edge-of-the-seat thriller, look away. Maazii could’ve been entertaining had it not been such a novice creation.