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. The setting of the movie and the characterization of the main protagonists (Naseeruddin Shah, Neha Dhupia, and Paresh Rawal) is almost a scene-by-scene replica of one of JHC’s novels. I don’t want to make any accusations here, but something stinks to high heaven (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 movie’s pace is extremely slow, and the suspense is not well-concealed. The characters behave very silly (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 the time of death. 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 scriptwriter if they had lifted the entire movie from the JHC novel instead of just the first 30 minutes.
