Mardaani 3 Movie Review: Rani Mukerji’s cop-thriller is strictly serviceable
Mardaani 3(2.5 / 5)
Mardaani 3 review:
In every homegrown feminist crime-thriller I dread a scene, most aptly showcased in this little OTT film called Mrs Undercover (2023). In it, Radhika Apte plays a homemaker who moonlights as a secret agent. A gender flip on The Family Man. Her mission is to nab a charming serial killer who has been luring women with the prospect of marriage. During the climax, when she finally gets to give him a deserved thrashing, for reasons unexplainable, she breaks into a Maa Durga cosplay, full with a trident and temple bells and prayer chants in the BGM. In Hollywood, every woman centric procedural might be hat-tipping to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), here though, it seems like we have to inevitably postulate towards Jai Santoshi Maa (1975).
Cast: Rani Mukerji, Mallika Prasad, Janki Bodiwala and Jisshu Sengupta
Directed by: Abhiraj Minawala
Written by: Aayush Gupta, Deepak Kingrani and Baljeet Singh Marwah
Mardaani 3, however, doesn’t get into the preaching, at least not from the get go. After facing-off against misogynist maniacs in the previous installments, Rani Mukerji’s bambaiya-accented, hard-nosed cop Shivani Shivaji Roy returns for a third helping. This time she has to take on something grander: human trafficking, which seems to be a new plot fad in women-driven police procedurals (The third season of Delhi Crime too had Shefali Shah struggling to dismantle a trafficking nexus).
The action ticks off when two girls, one a daughter of a foreign ambassador and the other of his driver get kidnapped. It reminded me of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) but the class bias of those in power is merely a footnote. What propels the film is a cat-n-mouse chase between Shivani and Amma (Mallika Prasad), the creepy lullaby-singing queenpin of the capital’s begging mafia.
For most of its runtime, Mardaani 3, in line with the features of the franchise, stays a pacy procedural. I enjoyed the bits where the traditional plot points were flipped like cops managing to trace a call even though the criminal hung up too quickly. The kidnapped girls, all of them pre-adolescent, are being injected with something which results in them being either “positive” or “negative” but we don’t know for what and this central mystery keeps you hooked. Shivani’s investigation progresses like a roller-coaster ride with enough thrilling turns. Expect some over-the-phone dialogue-baazi between the heroine and the villainess, evil side grins by backstabbing characters and Shivani solving the case not before she gets suspended. The first major plot-twist, when it comes, is as unprecedented as a jump scare but soon, the film starts gloating in its smartness and runs out of both steam and ideas.
Expectedly Rani Mukerji does most of the heavy lifting but her performance, although competent, offers nothing new. Her Shivani gets a Jawan-coded introduction in the first scene where she is infiltrating a drug-trafficking network in the guise of a porter. When Rani’s cover blows, the sack covering her face is torn under a knife-attack, to conveniently reveal only her signature cat-eye. The mask slips away soon to present the star. This massy-fication of Mukerji seems unnecessary in a franchise which is more interested in exploring the rot of society rather than deifying its protagonist. In another sequence, during a tense shootout, the camera wastes time in capturing Rani as she fires in slow motion. Theatrical is indeed a tricky business.
Mardaani 3 hangs somewhere between serving the nuance of an impactful story and the hoot-worthiness of a mass entertainer. It patiently builds but then loses all patience. We have an initial shot of a girl, climbing atop a tree, throwing a stone and breaking the window of an SUV which has her kidnapped friend. It’s not a deep scene but can still be read into like a literal metaphor for smashing the patriarchy. Compare it to the ending scenes when Shivani, before raining lashes on the main antagonist, shouts to her subordinate and also to the audience, “Humesha ladkiyan hi kyun?” (Why always girls?). The Durga chants wait for cue.