Rating – *** (3/5)
Team India Hai Hum! It’s a rousing chant that transforms into a song in the dying minutes of Maidaan, and sporadically, for a couple of montage sequences. A film that runs for three hours always treads on dangerous waters. It’s a bold call made by the makers when they decide to not skim on the runtime, especially for a period drama. In this case, a period sports drama. Maidaan chooses to pirouette around the tropes you anticipate in any sports drama, and that becomes even more obvious when a Hindi film superstar is playing the protagonist. You know he’s going to be the hero and beat insurmountable odds to reign supreme with the assistance of the underdogs, no one expects anything from. You sign up for that. But it becomes the director’s prerogative to make sure it doesn’t become a case of serving old wine in a new bottle.
Maidaan, the story of Indian football legend Syed Abdul Rahim (Ajay Devgn) focuses on the period of 1952-1962 which witnessed the unprecedented rise of Indian football that ultimately led to an unbelievable Asian Games win for a written-off Indian football team.
The problem with Maidaan though, isn’t the obvious tropes that it juggles with but it’s the sheer complacency with which it doesn’t choose to focus on character development. Gajraj Rao’s Parbhu Ghosh is one of the most underwhelming and perplexing characters I have ever seen. Apart from the one conflict of having Bengali players represent the Indian team, his vile behaviour and cunningness towards Rahim seem unjustified and unexplained. Priyamani is another victim of poor writing – as Rahim’s wife, Runa, is shown to be learning English and has a few jokes at that expense – why is she learning English, we never know.
And most importantly, Devgn – the usually reliable actor really struggles to portray the passion, aggression and elation that the game and the feat demands. His stoic personality and consistent emotionless reactions don’t justify Rahim to have been a ‘calm man’ – we get that but a natural human emotion that makes for the situations Rahim Saab was mounted with – just had Devgn being rather poker-faced throughout. Maidaan also suffers extensively due to the three-hour runtime. Things only start kicking in and with drama and urgency in the last hour. But the first half, especially, feels incredibly long, dragged and filled with unwanted sequences. Some shoddy CGI, weird sepia tones and the choice of villainizing opposite teams are more reasons due to why Maidaan never fulfils its true potential.
I do have to appreciate and applaud the production design and the continuity team who have done a flawless job with everything being era-appropriate. For a film that was delayed several times, you never feel the gap of time between character appearances in any manner.
Maidaan felt like a train that had lost its path until it reached the last hour, and when it finally found the right track – it ran, sped and traced like a bullet that makes for some of the most rousing sports sequences you’ll ever see.
The football choreography is impeccable and the frantic camera angles, incredible background score and design of a long climax match are spectacular and make up for the other bunch of flaws to a large extent.
Maidaan might not be perfect but the slow burn to reach one of the most satisfying crescendos in a sports drama biopic is worth enough to have you invest your time and money.