Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Huma Qureshi, Manushi Chhillar
Director: Pulpit
Platform: In Cinemas
Rating out 5: ★★
I watched Maalik expecting something that would at least rattle the walls a little. It opens like it wants to be Gangs of Wasseypur, smeared in blood, ambition, and the grime of the Indian heartland. But somewhere in the noise and posturing, you start to realise: there’s nothing underneath. It’s swagger without soul & violence without consequence. A film desperate to feel dangerous but too shallow to mean anything.
That’s the thing about Wasseypur, for all its brutality, it had brains. Every act of violence came with weight. History hung heavy over every gunshot. Motives mattered. Here, in Maalik, they don’t. People kill because they’re angry, or bored, or because the screenplay needs a crescendo. There’s no tension. No slow-burning vendetta. Just empty rage and camera flourishes. Rajkummar Rao, as the titular Maalik, growls and glares like he’s trying to make up for a script that never gave him a reason to be feared. And you can’t blame him. Rao is a good actor sharp, committed, usually able to mine something real from even the weakest material. But here, he’s stranded. Maalik isn’t a character, he’s a pose. We never really know who he is, what he wants, what keeps him up at night, or what pushed him off the edge. All we’re told is that he’s angry. That’s not enough.
Image: Tips films Production
You can see the film trying to make him into this mythic figure. A man who rises from trauma, fights a corrupt system, becomes a godfather. But the path from bruised underdog to ruthless overlord is stitched together with clichés and flashbacks instead of grit or emotional clarity. There’s a scene early on where he makes a police officer lick mud he’s spit on. It’s supposed to mark the moment he becomes feared. But it just feels hollow. The moment has no setup, no context. The film wants shock value without the legwork. It’s theatre without stakes.
It doesn’t help that no one around him seems to be playing the same game. Manushi Chhillar, as his wife Shalini, is given the impossible task of adding emotional weight to a character who disappears for half the film and reappears only when the script needs a moral compass. There’s no heat between her and Rao, no lived-in texture to their relationship. It’s like watching two strangers improvise a marriage. The same goes for the side characters Badauna, the best friend; the crooked cops; the rival gangsters. Everyone is either underwritten or overwritten, swinging between flat and cartoonish. You’re not invested in any of them. They don’t seem invested in each other.
What Maalik does have is volume. The film is loud, relentlessly so. Guns roar in slow motion, scenes play out over pounding music that screams “Look how intense this is!” while your brain starts to tune out. The violence, meant to shock or impress, just becomes exhausting. By the halfway mark, it’s all a blur of blood and booming monologues. If there’s a message in all of it, it’s buried under too many layers of style. Somewhere in this film, there might be a story about power and corruption, about what happens when the system fails and rage becomes the only currency. But the film never slows down long enough to find it. It’s too busy playing dress-up in the clothes of better gangster films.
The comparisons to Gangs of Wasseypur aren’t just fair, they’re invited. You can feel the influence in every frame. But where Wasseypur had an intimate, almost forensic attention to place and peoplewhere it dug into caste, economy, and betrayal with a scalpel, Maalik just imitates the surface. Long shots of motorbikes kicking up dust, standoffs under bridges, growling voiceovers. It’s all there. But without substance, these details mean nothing. They’re not storytelling tools; they’re decorations.
Even the structure feels borrowed. The flashbacks, the non-linear jumps, the scenes that cut abruptly from domestic warmth to sudden execution. But none of it builds tension. It’s just noise dressed as complexity. I found myself wondering, scene after scene: who are these people really? Why should I care? And the film never answers. Or if it does, it’s too busy shouting to be heard.
What saves Maalik from being a complete waste of time is Rajkummar Rao himself. Even when trapped in a half-formed role, he’s trying to find the truth. You can see the effort in his eyes, in the moments between lines, in the way he holds his stillness. But he’s working alone. He’s been put into the centre of a story that doesn’t know what to do with him. And after a while, he stops fighting it. You can sense it. He’s doing his job. He’s giving the audience what the film promised: grit, violence, intensity. But there’s no heart in it.
There’s a version of this movie that could’ve worked. One that stayed closer to the ground. One that gave Maalik a real backstory, a believable arc. One that understood that violence only matters when it comes with consequence. But that version doesn’t exist here. What we get is something bloated, noisy, and derivative like a karaoke version of a song that once meant something. A gangster film for people who think gangster films are about sunglasses and slow-mo, not about desperation and decay.
Two stars. One for Rao’s effort, and one for a handful of shots that, if nothing else, remind you how striking Indian cinema can look when it wants to. The rest is just a mess. Maalik wants to be iconic. It wants to be dangerous. But instead, it settles for being loud. And loud, as we’ve learned, isn’t the same as powerful.
If you want to see what this genre can really do, go watch Gangs of Wasseypur again. At least there, when someone pulls the trigger, it means something.
