Maalik Review | A Flawed Coming-Of-Age Gangster Drama That Prefers Swagger Over Depth

When you make these gangster drama films, most of the time the story arc is something that will be very familiar to the audience, and what makes many well-received gangster films memorable is the way they build the world. By the end of the movie, we will be very much involved in the world of that story, and you will be thinking about the life of the main character. Despite having enough dialogue bazi to its credit, the latest Rajkummar Rao starrer gangster film Maalik, is struggling to build a solid character arc. With familiar beats getting this hasty execution, this movie by Pulkit is an underwhelming experience.

Set in the year 1990, the story is about a man named Deepak from Allahabad, who aspired to be a big shot. His father was a farmer, and the social setup made him a person who wanted to have power. What we see in this movie is his step-by-step growth in the search for power and all the things that came in his way in that journey.

In the initial patches of the movie, where we see the power of this person in the present day, the screenplay is creating that eagerness in people’s minds to know his story. But from around the point where the movie slips into the flashback of the character, the writing seems to be confused about where to focus. The flashback portion is trying to make his entry to the gangster world literally explosive, but because of the genericness, you won’t really feel that heroism. In the second half of the movie, there are too many things happening, and they are all happening at a rapid pace, so the movie is not giving the audience time to absorb the Shakespearean drama in the tale.

Pulkit, who has previously made the Subash Chandra Bose biopic with Rajkummar, gets the visual aesthetic of the movie in an impressive way. You get to see these saturated colors in certain scenes with this rustic visual texture that recreates that era, and also the tone of the movie. But the problem is with the writing. In one of the instances, it is shown to us that in order to avoid attacks and stuff, Maalik sleeps on the roof of various people’s houses. It would have been great if aspects like those had some more prominence in the screenplay, which would have made the world-building a lot more interesting. One of the villains of the movie is Prosenjit Chatterjee’s Prabhu Das. While the movie presented him as a deadly antagonist, he vanishes after a point, and the character is in panic mode, seeing one retaliation tactic from Maalik. We can predict the trajectory of the story when the mood of the film shifts drastically.

Even though he has done a movie like Omerta in the past, this is the first true-blue action hero stuff Rajkummar Rao is trying. Since the film is showing the whole journey of the character, it is offering Rajkummar a chance to portray his acting caliber, and he gracefully shows the transition of the common man to a dreaded gangster. Anshumaan Pushkar, as Maalik’s right hand, gets a memorable character, and he performed that part with the required swagger. Manushi Chhillar as the wife of Maalik, Shalini, is fine in her role, and unlike many of her other films, it wasn’t an inconsequential role. Prosenjit Chatterjee as Prabhu Das gets this poorly written character of an encounter specialist cop. Saurabh Shukla, Saurabh Sachdeva, Swanand Kirikire, etc., are the other major names in the cast.

After giving promises of being a nuanced coming-of-age story of a gangster, Maalik loses its rhythm and becomes a hollow show of heroics. Looking at the way this movie has ended, after skimming through all those cliched plot points we see in gangster flicks, I thought the current climax would have worked as an interval block. Maalik tries to achieve too many things in one go and, unfortunately, struggles to create that essential emotional connect.