By Hindustan Times
Direction: Kabeer Kaushik
Actors: Sonu Sood, Naseeruddin Shah, Mohan Agashe
Rating: **
Can all of us agree that Bollywood has squeezed as much cinema as is humanly possible out of Mumbai’s infamous encounter cops, their weasel-faced informers and the police-politician-builder-underworld nexus? Can these subjects be embargoed for the following five years in order that viewers get a break from grim men gunning down other grim men in dark alleys? And while we're at it, let’s ban girls jiggling in dance bars too.
In Maximum, director Kabeer Kaushik takes all the above and fashions it right into a cautionary tale about two power-hungry, corrupt encounter specialists. Pratap Pandit, played by Sonu Sood, is the young turk who challenges the supremacy of the equally blood-thirsty Arun Inaamdar, played by Naseeruddin Shah. Their rivalry is used and abused by their seniors and juniors, a don and a wily politician. Everyone shoots at one another until all of them fall down.
Kaushik, who earlier made the police drama Sehar, is obviously enamoured by these men. Pratap is a rockstar cop who invariably walks in glorifying slow-motion, has a loving wife and child, but may be living it up with Bollywood belles and bar dancers, and doesn’t such a lot speak as pronounce judgment with inordinately long pauses. Using his imposing physicality to full effect, Sood mostly postures while Shah slums it. He keeps a hard and fast snarling expression for a lot of the film.
Kaushik has also written the film but he seems more fascinated by style than substance. There may be little character delineation or growth. It’s all about being gritty and funky. So characters deliver lines comparable to ‘bada game khelo’ or ‘what a player.’ Slow motion shots of birds flying over Maximum City are usually used to glue scenes. Kaushik effectively captures the crowds and frenetic energy but little this is compelling or new. The entire usual Mumbai sights are ticked off — local trains, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, Marine Drive lashed by the rains. Too early within the film, fatigue sets in and the strangely inert plot doesn’t help to relieve it.
Maximum has stray moments of power however the film looks like a Ram Gopal Varma rehash; mercifully though there are not any cameras zooming into teacups like there have been in Varma’s recently released Department, which was also about power-hungry, corrupt encounter specialists.
We actually need an embargo.
