Maximum movie reviews featuring Neha Dhupia and Sonu Sood in the lead roles. Neha Dhupia’s Maximum critics movie review. Maximum review by critics featuring Neha Dhupia and Sonu Sood.
Maximum movie is set in scenes of Mumbai during 2003. Big Land deals, intense politics and in the center of it all, a volatile story around two cops (Sonu Sood, Naseeruddin Shah). Arshad Warsi is also reported to play encounter specialist against his previous roles, but later he turned down the part.
MAXIMUM is basically about an encounter specialist and the highs and lows in his life. Not the usual, beaten to death cop story, MAXIMUM could’ve been a riveting fare that would enlighten and entertain. But, like I pointed out earlier, there’s not much that the film offers on the table, after you’re told about the two warring factions. There are sequences that seem repetitive or an extension of what one has watched earlier, besides moments that seem so hard to absorb in a realistic fare. The climax, for instance, though filmed brilliantly, looks unreal as the two cops battle it out on a secluded railway platform. Besides, the film unravels at a languid speed, which is quite a deterrent for a thriller.
There is something to be said for clinical exposition that doesn’t beat about the bush, but Maximum features good actors lazily reeling off lines that go nowhere.
An old man quotes Shakespeare and speaks of providence while politicians and cops talk between teacups, and some low-res newsclip footage of the 26/11 attacks are spliced in.
Sood’s character is conflicted. Is he good? Is he bad? Is he a family man? What he comes across as is a cop who likes to have fun with guns and thinks it is okay to go and sleep with other women as long as he takes care of his wife and kids too. It’s fine to have shades of grey but if the main character is portrayed as a jerk, it’s a little hard to feel sorry when bad things happen to him. His performance however, quite decent.
The script fails on many levels and the film seems longer than its 150-minute duration. The events, after a point, make no sense and become hard to follow because you are just too damn bored to care anymore.
Admirably the director doesn`t use the two principal characters to form a central conflict. Kaushik`s narration is as ruthless and stripped of humour and other sources of cinematic solace as the world his characters inhabit. A certain amount of familiarity with the world of encounter killings is assumed on the audiences` part. We are expected to understand the subverted value-system of the encounter cops who do their social cleansing and in the process get so embroiled in blood, their hands are soaked in the very blood that they are meant to wash away.
Maximum is a case of too much blood and blabber being wasted on a tale that has been flogged to death to such an extent that it is probably now a veritable carcass rotting in the Bollywood sun. No amount of social and political layering can dispel the rancid odour.
Maximum lacks the nuanced detailing and the urgent pacing that should have automatically sprung from a theme yanked out of the internal files of a highly politicised police force.
Director Kabeer Kaushik, has a good force of actors here and a gripping premise (with strong references to prominent encounter cops from recent past), but he doesn’t quite lead the way. There are scenes where he triggers good performances, but with the inclusion of too many facts, figures and case files, it loses entertainment value. And gradually the plot fades into dark gullies of our big, bad Maximum city.
