★★★
“Naan but the brave.”
This sequel to Mardaani sees Rani Mukerji return in the role of hard-edged police superintendent Shivani Shivaji Roy. She’s now on the hunt for a serial killer, who is brutally murdering and raping victims in her jurisdiction, the city of Kota in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. The killer is Sunny (Jethwa), a 21-year-old psychopath, whose father murdered his mother, and who also works as an assassin for rising politician Govind Mishra (Ketkar). When Sunny sees SP Roy on television, making disparaging remarks about the killer, and vowing to catch him, he decides to target her. This is in addition to his work for Mishra, though after that relationship goes sour, Mishra’s family becomes yet another target of Sunny’s unhinged wrath.
The director of this was the writer on the previous movie, and it’s slightly less effective overall, mostly due to a tendency to descend into polemic on occasion. For example, it opens and closes with the kind of trite, “Well, actually” nuggets of information you’d expect to find on Twitter. There’s also a television interview late on, which seems to serve no purpose, except to allow Roy to go off on a rant about how downtrodden women are in Indian society. I mean, she’s not wrong. It’s just that a moral lecture is not why I’m here. I am here for the heroine slamming her car-door on a suspect’s head. Fortunately, the film is able to deliver this as well.
The two performances at the centre of this are spot-on, and do a fine job of keeping your attention, when the storyline occasionally falters. Sunny is barking mad, with enough issues for an entire conference of forensic psychologists, and the details of his crimes, even if just described, are grim. Yet he is undeniably smart, though fatally flawed by his ego. He breaks the fourth wall on a number of occasions, directly addressing the audience to explain himself. It’s highly creepy. Meanwhile, SP Roy is every bit as driven on her side, willing to bend protocol into a pretzel in pursuit of justice. She just doesn’t care about anything else: she may be married, but her husband is entirely irrelevant to proceedings.
There’s a ticking clock too. After a possible witness is killed by Sunny, she is reassigned, and only has 48 hours to close the case, over the holiday of Diwali. That’s the Hindu festival of lights, and offers a glowing backdrop against which the climax of the movie can unfold. When it dies, there’s a good sense of catharsis in the way things unfold. It’s not only Roy who gets to punish the evil in the world, doing so in a way which is as much about making a statement as anything else. Despite occasional missteps, this is a decent sequel, and if you’re worried about it being Bollywood, there are no musical numbers to derail proceedings. Mardaani 3 is in production, and I’m looking forward to it.
Dir: Gopi Puthran
Star: Rani Mukerji, Vishal Jethwa, Prasanna Ketkar, Shruti Bapna