Rajkummar Rao is going through a purple patch. Taking a break from his comic capers, this week, the actor dons the cape of an outlaw, a product of social injustice who ends up becoming the mirror image of what he sets out to wipe off.

Maalik sounds like a spiritual cousin of Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhaiyya Ji, which was released last year. Both films posit masters of understatement who revel in realistic space in a bombastic, mainstream atmosphere. While Bhaiyya Ji went completely off-key after setting up the conflict, Maalik has its moments as writer-director Pulkit manages to create the mood that we associate with Tigmanshu Dhulia’s kind of cinema.

The film is set in the feudal Allahabad of the late 1980s, where Deepak (Rajkummar), the son of a farm worker (a solid Rajendra Gupta), rebels against the landlords to become a ganglord and assumes the title of ‘Maalik.’ The police stations of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are full of case files of history sheeters like Deepak, who picked up a gun because of caste or class struggle, and were adopted by politicians to maintain the balance of power. Raj lends the flawed character flesh and blood, and adds sparks to the predictable character arc.

The locations are not decorative, dialogues have traces of dynamite, and the posturing of the politicians, led by Saurabh Shukla and Swanand Kirkire, sounds realistic. The politician-criminal nexus laced with episodes of revenge and betrayal has been told numerous times before. In such stories, the leader becomes a liability after a point, and the love interest of the gangster assumes the moral centre of the story. Here, Manushi Chhillar plays that predictable part well.

The surprise package is Prosenjit Chatterjee as the ageing encounter specialist brought in to hunt down Maalik. With his Bengali touch and stylish demeanour, the seasoned performer brings freshness to a stock character. Anshuman Pushkar and Saurabh Sachdeva match Raj’s magical mundanity to generate the grime and grind that we associate with the region, but the screenplay doesn’t allow them to flex their muscles beyond a point.

A still from ‘Maalik’
| Photo Credit:
Tips Films/YouTube

The pacing is problematic, the editing is uneven, and the narrative contrivances are left uncovered. The set pieces are gripping, but their tails sag. The catchy item number composed by Sachin Jigar — and suitably performed by Huma Qureshi — is also lazily accommodated into the story. So does the background score that assumes its own life at crucial junctures and is not integrated into the narrative. The scenes and language that have won the film an adult certificate are avoidable.

Overall, it feels like the makers are under the impression that they are telling something novel when, perhaps, the effort should have been to hide the obvious. At 152 minutes, the picture gets pixellated, and one gets piqued. However, the climax featuring a dancing Prosenjit and a scowling Raj once again injects adrenaline.

Maalik is currently running in theatres