Maximum: This is Sood stuff’


Maximum
Starring: Naseeruddin Shah, Sonu Sood,Neha Dhupia, Vinay Pathak
At: PVR & others
Rated: 5/10
This is Maximum City for you. As Vinay Pathak tells you in the film, it has a place for everyone. And that includes even the nth Bollywood mount on the life and times of encounter cops.
Though you would think the subject was strictly the forte of directors like Ram Gopal Varma, this one by Kabeer Kaushik, too, manages to get its moments though there is nothing that we did not already know about the shadowy world of trigger-happy policemen on a mission to clean a city full of unholy nexuses.
Maximum’s showstopper though is not the story but its central character. As a young cop climbing the ab tak chhappan ladder, he stares you down, much like his gun. He loves his wife, plays with the mall, dances with the bar girls, drinks with the team and, of course, kills with a thorough kind of finesse which makes all the blood and gore look incidental and necessary.
This is Sood’s maximum story of cashing in on solo advantage which had evaded him till now. Despite the towering presence of Naseeruddin Shah as the ageing, rival encounter cop, Sood and his deep set eyes hold forth without a niggle.
However, that does not take away from the niggles in the movie he so ferociously tries to propel. Though the slice of cop life is there in bits, where on earth would you have cop killing cop, cop eliminating informer networks and cop doing cop more than cop doing criminals? Maximum comes with many such faultlines but it is nevertheless worth a watch.
Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 1 July, 2012

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