Review of Raajneeti (2010) by Jonathan I — 09 Jul 2010

As is widely known, the movie takes its inspiration from the Mahabharata. Therefore, in the spirit of the Hindu epic, Raajneeti is at its core a tale of succession wars between ambitious cousins. In this modern reimagination, however, the Hastinapur happens to be a parliamentary constituency somewhere in North-Central India. The setting is ripe for a taut game of chess (in case you missed that anvilicious scene with Samar playing the game on his phone) where conspiracies and counter-conspiracies are flying everywhere. Inasfar as being a thriller, the script succeeds in moving with such lightning speed that it holds your attention all through the 3 hrs without resorting to any extraneous Bollywood filler.

However, the plotting of the movie comes at a serious expense to the bloated character list, none of whom get sufficient amount of development that would elevate them from being 2D puppets. Much kudos to the actors who manage to make their presence far more interesting than what were probably presented to them on script (entitled politicians, corrupt sniveling police officers, Michael Corleone Clone, etc etc.) There's no better evidence of that than when you look at Katrina Kaif. Not that she had an enormous lot to work with regarding her character Indu, but compared to someone like, say, Manoj Bajpai who makes his moustache-twirling villain still somewhat compelling, her subpar performance only serves to make her even more superfluous. The only character decision that was pretty interesting was that of Brijgopal, a modernized grey-scaled avatar of Krishna, played superbly by Nana Patekar. Unfortunately, he doesn't get much screentime and the character gets pretty muddled towards the end.

The movie can be pretty amusing or horrifying, depending on your temperament, in showing the state of Indian politics, but with regards to that theme, it's only beating a dead horse and offering nothing new nor substantial.