‘Mardaani 3’: Sluggish story mars brisk storytelling

In celebration of her 30th year in films, Rani Mukerji returns as Shivani Shivaji Roy, the empowered woman super cop who seeks to banish all the ills wreaked on women and young prepubescent girls.

Shivani is upright and uptight, a ‘Singham’ in her own right. It’s a familiar role for Rani, who is essaying it the third time round in a film that hubby-producer Aditya Chopra has turned into a family IP under the Yash Raj banner.

The first in the series, directed by Pradeep Sarkar in 2014, presented Rani Mukerji in the role of the rampaging cop. It did well at the box office and won Rani plaudits. The sequel in 2019 was a decent follow-up. It’s taken seven years thereafter for Rani Mukerji to tread familiar ground, but the plot feels rather simplistic and has little reason to exist other than to keep the producer’s biwi happy.

Directed by Abhiraj Minawala, it centres around woman and girl child trafficking linked to vaccine development for cervical cancer. The main players here are Shivani, Fatima (Janki Bodiwala), who is a junior cop assisting Shivani, and the villains Amma (Mallika Prasad) and her adopted son Ramanujan (Prajesh Kashyap).

The story plays a little too neat to generate intrigue. Everything falls into place way too easily. President’s Medal winner Shivani Shivaji Roy is called on to solve the kidnapping of an Ambassador’s daughter and she unearths the evidence of 93 young girls missing under mysterious circumstances — all linked to the same criminal network. Shivani goes into an overdrive, determined to take the trafficking mafia down.

Shivani is fighting a system that works only for the rich and powerful. In belated fashion, she awakens to the fact that all those other missing children also need to be rescued. Once the Ambassador’s daughter is retrieved, the script conveniently gives her the leeway to make that her mission.

There are quite a few plot holes, the biggest being Shivani’s confrontation with the dreaded antagonist, Amma, in the former’s own home. Consequently, we see her allowing Amma to walk away from the scene of crime for which she would have been incarcerated. Obviously, the writer needed Amma to be free to keep the plot boiling.

At 130 minutes, the storytelling remains brisk. The action is smartly choreographed. The director makes this an unchallenging though neatly packaged star vehicle. There’s way too much restraint in the manner in which the supporting characters are framed. The mandatory sermon at the end comes across as tedious.

The main reason why the film manages to keep you engaged are the performances. Rani Mukerji leads from the front. Her de-glam look and no nonsense attitude, coupled with a refined and commanding presence, lends a certain forcefulness to Shivani Shivaji Roy.

Mallika Prasad serves up a surprise as the canny antagonist. John Stewart Eduri’s background score plays a complementary role in keeping the audience invested.