Maharaja movie review: Contrived screenplay overshadows the few good things in Vijay Sethupathi’s film

It’s hard to write about Maharaja without spoilers since the film’s biggest highlights are those carefully contrived twists and turns. Some of them work despite coming across as engineered, and some leave you with a feeling of being an unwilling participant in the director’s ruse and writing gimmick. Maharaja (Vijay Sethupathu), a bruised aging man, walks into Pallikaranai police station in Chennai, claiming three thieves broke into his house and stole his ‘Lakshmi’. After the cops interrogate him, the furious cops realise the missing item is an old iron dustbin. Maharaja claims that the dustbin is of sentimental value to him and his daughter as it saved the latter during a fatal accident that killed his wife — something that gets established in the prologue of the film.

However, as audience, it is easy to know there is more to Maharaja’s presence at the police station. He also makes a bizarre claim that one of the thieves has an ear on the back of his body. He gets slapped more than once for trying to find out if someone in the police force has an ear growing on their back. But when Maharaja offers lakhs of rupees as bribe to Inspector Varadan (Natty), they start taking him seriously. There is a parallel story of Selvam (Anurag Kashyap) and his accomplice stealing from isolated houses and raping the women there. To confuse things further, we have another track of a mechanic who gets beaten up by a car owner for stealing his sunglasses,  a gift given to him by the late Tamil actor Kunal. The police force starts fleecing money out of Maharaja and tries to come up with a clone of the dustbin to close the case. However, the dustbin was never the point of the whole film. Maharaja has been on a secret mission from the start and when the mess of the screenplay is put in order, it might be a shocker– even heartbreaking–but if one doesn’t get carried away by the emotions, it is not that hard to see through all the contrivances and problems with the convenient writing.

Nithilan Swaminathan had an interesting core idea, and he has written a story around it, bending the narrative and timelines to fit the idea, which makes things look engineered. The purpose of this deliberate and convoluted writing is to surprise the audience and make them go, ‘I didn’t see that coming’. That makes Maharaja more of a visual puzzle than an engaging film. ‘Puzzle’ is a befitting word as the scenes are disjointed and thrown in a sequence to mislead the audience. Once the jigsaw video clips are put in order at the climax, the emerging picture is a usual revenge drama. The reason behind the bloodbath is something Tamil cinema keeps going back to without sensitivity. There’s only a thin line that separates exploitation and concern when it comes to movies that fight for a cause. Maharaja doesn’t seem to tread the line that well.

The film relies heavily on performances, and while Vijay Sethupathi shoulders the film as a taciturn aging man repeating the same thing over and over again, Anurag Kashyap, despite his best efforts, is terribly miscast in the film. His bad lip syncs are jarring. Though the editor and cinematographers have done their best to cover it up, Anurag sticks out as a sore thumb. The same could be said about the intended dark humour in the film. There are more misses than hits. The Kunal fan gimmick doesn’t do much to the film because Nithilan has laid out a maze and as a member of audience, I was worried about walking out of the mess than laughing at some mediocre jokes. The overarching problem with Maharaja is its ‘wannabe’ nature to come across as a gritty, dark, and emotional rollercoaster. It is more concerned about how it wants to come across than what it really is.

Maharaja cast: Vijay Sethupathi, Anurag Kashyap, Abhirami, Mamta Mohandas

Maharaja director: Nithilan Swaminathan

Maharaja rating: 2 stars