The Badlands:
The son of an oppressed farmer decides to go rogue and give himself the title of maalik. There is class and caste rage here, and a man’s desire to “snatch” what won’t come to him by fair means. There are issues affecting our society that need to be addressed, and mainstream cinema has the ability to do that, but what is to be done if the lead actor, known for playing light and dramatic roles, wants to go full macho.
So director and co-writer (with Jyotsna Nath), Pulkit designs Maalik, a film that gives Rajkummar Rao the chance to beat men to death, dunk their heads in hot oil, burn them alive, have vicious fistfights, and shoot more men than the number needed to populate a small town.
The outlaw or baaghi used to be a legit way to portray an anti-hero—he was fighting an unjust feudal system; there was a tragic nobility to him, remorse, and some manner of redemption. Deepak aka Maalik is corrupt, excessively violent and amoral. Set in 1990s Allahabad (now Prayagraj), the fight is not between the righteous and the wicked, it is between two gangsters –the other being Chandrashekhar, played by Saurabh Sachdeva) vying for government contacts and sand-mining rights. Obviously a corrupt politician, Balhar Singh (Swanand Kirkire), his gangster cohort Shankar Singh (Saurabh Shukla), an ‘ab tak 98’ encounter cop Prabhu Das (Prosenjit) are thrown into the toxic swamp.
Deepak/Maalik loses sympathy when soon after opening scene, he makes a cop lick his own spit off the ground, (a “forward caste” man as the dialogue informs) and kills him. No matter what he does after this, and no matter how his descent into crime is justified, the sheer evil of this scene means that the audience cannot root for such a man. He is not just snatching what he is being deprived of, he is reveling in his evil, and enjoying the fear that his carnage evokes in people, including cops.
With his friend Baudan Singh (Anshuman Pushkar) and other loyal gang members, he goes about his murderous sprees with impunity, disregarding the pleas of his parents and wife (Manushi Chhillar) to reform.
There is nothing in Maalik that has not been seen in films before, and Pulkit has just turned his protagonist into a despicable monster, and painted the cops as the enemy. Prabhu Das is referred to as “licencewala gunda” so who cares about dozens of men in khaki mowed down for just doing their jobs.
A film with relentless violence cannot be entertaining, but Maalik is just unpleasant, not even slightly engaging. It is not a particularly tough role for Rajkummar Rao, and he can emote when the scene demands it, but the swagger looks imitative of earlier action stars and villains. He does not play Maalik like a nice guy, without the physique or mindset to be bad, forced by circumstances to become a killer; there is no complexity to his badness, so to project the vile in him, he needs props like a cigarette and a gun. Actors would walk on coals to do the kind of roles Rao has done in the past, and he wants to be run of the mill!
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
