★★★½
“Korma’s a bitch… Uh, I mean KARMA…
Officer Shivani Shivaji Roy (Mukerji) is part of the Serious Crimes Squad in Delhi, whose approach to policing is very much “by any means necessary.” However, she is taken out of her area of expertise when Pyaari. a young girl she has been helping goes missing from an orphanage. Everything indicates the girl has been picked up by a sex trafficking ring, run by Sunny Katyal (Verma) and his partner, Karan (Bhasin), and will soon be sold off to the highest bidder and exported out of the country. Roy has to work her way up the chain to rescue Pyaari, despite opposition both from her boss, because it’s not her responsibility, and from the gang. As she gets nearer to the top, the climb becomes increasingly hard, with the criminals making it clear they won’t take lightly the threat to their lucrative business which Roy represents. It’s also clear they have friends in high places.
There’s a long-standing issue of extrajudicial action by the police in India, known locally as “encounter killings.” This film is far more likely to be the problem than the solution here, with the heroine behaving in a way of which Dirty Harry would certainly approve, yet severely at odds with contemporary Western policing methods. That’s apparent right from an early scene where she publicly assaults a culprit, punctuating a list of his offenses: “Section 143 – unlawful assembly. [Slap!] Section 147 – rioting. [Slap!] Section 132 – abetment of mutiny [Slap!]”, and so on. To see a male police officer do this in a modern movie would be shocking. To see a woman do it? It’s… kinda awesome, especially in India, a country where at the time the film came out, woman represented only 6.6% of the police force.
This comes to a climax at the end,. when she faces off against Karan, and he mocks her, saying his contacts will ensure he gets off lightly. She replies, “They can do it only if you reach the police station. But you won’t reach the police station, because this is India.” Then, when he asks, “Are you going to murder me in front of everyone?”, she responds, “In India, if 50 people take the law in their hands and kill someone, then it’s not called a murder. It’s called ‘Public outrage’.” As a rabble-rousing, cryptofascist call for vigilante justice due to corruption goes… This one certainly doesn’t hold back.
But it still works well, with Mukerji making Roy a well-rounded and sympathetic character. Her mission is driven as much by a semi-maternal rage as the usual macho bullshit, and she relies just as much on intelligence as brute force. Although the film loses steam when diverting attention to the bad guys, who are little more than cartoon caricatures, I especially enjoyed the phone-calls where Karan attempts to intimidate her, and fails completely. For Roy goes all Liam Neeson on him instead: “I don’t know what your name is. I don’t know where you are speaking from, who your boss is, or where you have kept Pyaari. But I’ve figured your type… I will hunt you down in 30 days.” Even the most liberal of viewers would be forgiven a fist-pump at the end when justice, legitimate or not, is served, piping-hot with a side of poppadoms.
Dir: Pradeep Sarkar,
Star: Rani Mukerji, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Jisshu Sengupta, Saanand Verma