Maharathi starring three acting powerhouses – Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, and Paresh Rawal is a huge disappointment. If you still want to know more, here goes…
Maharathi is supposedly based on a Gujarati play…but it develops more like a James Hadley Chase novel. In fact, the setting of the movie, and the charcterization of the main protagonists (Naseeruddin Dhah, Neha Dhupia, and Paresh Rawal) is almost a scene by scene replica of one of JHC’s novels. Don’t want to make any accusations here, but…something definitely stinks to high heaven here (and I don’t mean the dead body in the freezer).
Anyway, apart from the question about the source of this movie, what does anyone say about a thriller where there is one suicide and one accident – no murder at all.
The pace of the movie is extremely slow and the suspense is not too well-concealed. The characters behave in a very silly manner (for example, Boman Irani who is supposed to be a savvy criminal lawyer incriminates himself in a very stupid fashion). Neha and Paresh hide a dead body in a freezer for a couple of weeks, and believe that will confuse the police as to time of death. Hmm…actually, they were probably right in their estimation of the Mumbai police force as Om Puri as the police inspector seems to touch heights of idiocy.
All in all…it would have been better for the director and the script writer if they had lifted the entire movie from the JHC novel, instead of just the first 30 minutes.
