Maidaan

Documenting the golden era of Indian football through a moving tribute to its architect Syed Abdul Rahim, Maidaan makes space for soccer in a cricket-crazed nation. Like the fortunes of Indian football, Maidaan’s journey has also been jinxed because of several reasons. It is sad that during the making of the film we lost the fearsome trio of P.K. Banerjee, Chunni Goswami and Tulsidas Balaram that won us the 1962 Asian Games gold medal at Jakarta. However, the wait has been worth it as director Amit Ravindernath Sharma scores at least three goals. Led by a fully invested Ajay Devgn as the chain-smoking Rahim, the film attempts to remove the miasma from the period when India was a football powerhouse in Asia, a chapter that has slipped out of public memory. It records the times when football drove the aspirations of the youth of the newly independent nation, without romanticising it.

Maidaan Movie Conclusion: On the whole, MAIDAAN is one of the finest sports-based films of Bollywood that rests on captivating drama, strong emotions, clapworthy moments, and a National Award-worthy performance by Ajay Devgn. At the box office, it might take a slow start but has the potential to show a strong jump over its extended weekend due to positive word of mouth, especially in urban centres, and thus emerge victorious at the box office. Recommended!

Director Amit Ravindernath Sharma is used to making 30-second advertisements, and 'Maidaan' gives him a chance to helm something more than 300 times longer. He did falter in the first half of the 180-minute film, as the slow pace tests your patience. However, in the second half, he headbutts it out of the park with an engaging screenplay and some delightful camera work. Special mention to sports directors of photography, Fyodor Lyass, Tassaduq Hussain, and Christopher Reed. Given football is a sport of movement, probably for the first time, go-pro cameras have been used in a feature film, adding to the nail-biting experience. The matches are gripping and make you cheer for the players and even shed a tear at their failure.

Maidaan is a passionately woven sports-biopic on the coach that led India to an underdog-victory at the 1962 Asian Games. The movie is tidily made and shows all that Syed Abdul Rahim had to go through, in his short yet meaningful life. Ajay Devgn delivers one of his most emotionally rousing performances, that is sure to win him numerous accolades. The eye to detail that director Amit Ravindernath Sharma has is worth appreciating. Casting of the players, to cinematography, complex camera-shots in the match sequences and the adrenaline-filled background score, the movie nails it all. From the first scene to the last, the beautiful amalgamation of scale backed by vision is clearly visible. It is the last 20 minutes of Maidaan where your patience truly gets rewarded and you leave the auditorium with an emotional high, that very few films can give you.

Unlike Chak De! India, a benchmark in the genre, which packed in so much on so many counts: An embattled Muslim coach, an unruly team and its individual woes, motivational speeches, theoretical tactics and their practical culmination... Or Jhund's enthusiastic display of underdog gusto wherein a bunch of gully kids demonstrated a spunkier game than professional footballers... Or even '83's retro insights into India's unprecedented, underdog victory, Maidaan's washed-out proceedings drag on for three long hours and highlight little of its forefathers struggle. Be it the indiscernible passage of time and negligible ageing or a lacklustre commentary box that could take a leaf from Amar's furious football of sherbet glasses, Maidaan's snooze soccer draws out more yawns than yays.

The three hour long film feels like a stretch in places where the drama amped-up-just-for-effect and the blaring background music threatens to overpower the action. Not all the musical stretches are terrible, though: the one which accompanies the discovery of a player in an unexpected quarter early in the film, for example, is lovely. But after a point, it becomes too loud, too much, and you feel like clapping your hands over your ears. ‘Maidaan’ also tends to get into an explanatory tell-don’t-show mode often. And the templates of a sporting drama stay templated: an encouraging-speech-by-coach-just-before-a-crucial-match comes off more a colourless long dialogue on the ‘power of one’, than a rousing let’s-go-and-get-’em anthem.