Mukkabaaz (The Brawler, 2018) "A Half-Hearted Knockout"

Starring:- Vineet Kumar Singh, Jimmy Shergill, Ravi Kishan, Zoya Hussain, Rajesh Tailang, Shreedhar Dubey.

Directed by:- Anurag Kashyap.

At the end of Mukkabaaz, I heard the once overtly enthusiastic audience behind me turn silent and exhaling loudly. I belong to the former part, trying to control the bubbling organelles inside my brain and square in on the answer to a question which I am faced with after watching a Kashyap film - What did just happen?

Shravan (Singh) is the best boxer in Bhagwaan Das Mishra's (Shergill) ruthless roster. In the first few minutes, in an attempt to woo Mishra's mute niece Sunaina (Hussain), Shravan punches Mishra over a minuscule difference of opinions and thus begins the downward spiral of Shravan's aspirations of becoming a renowned boxer. Love, caste, weighing machines, boxing gloves and cows transform Mukkabaaz into something antecedent to Kashyap's oeuvre, like the first road in the woods - materialism and woe melted together in an engrossing concoction.

For a Kashyap fan, the opening scene seems like a welcoming nod to familiar grounds, strewn with blood and violence, although not having the requisite competence which mostly aids Kashyap's twisty oeuvre, leading to discomfort laying itself over one's expectations. Mukkabaaz being Kashyap's most straightforward and deepest movie to date, manages to address every sociocultural issue with equal amounts of time and dedication, which is currently strangling the state of Uttar Pradesh, disallowing it to free itself from that eternal bog of decadence. The realism with which Kashyap shows the rotting bureaucratic machinery keeps constancy with the rest of his films, a lively reminder that we are watching a Kashyap film, a feeling much rarer than usual when it comes to Mukkabaaz.

The screenplay by Vineet Singh and Kashyap is wafer-thin in its approach. There are some nugatory attempts at bringing the Kashyapian humor into the movie, which often feels as if the movie is trying to ascertain itself as a product of Kashyap. In reality, even if it evokes Kashyap throughout its physique and the exquisite boxing scenes, aesthetically the movie falls in Aanand L Rai's court. The love scenes and the frothy screenplay do less to salvage the movie from falling into the pit of commercialized love stories.

And to top these off are the dozens of songs, most of them being useless, which keep our auditory senses stimulated, although not in a good way. They tend to pull the attention away or to load down on scenes which could have been better in the event of their absence, although they have been shot beautifully. The major plus point of the movie are the performances. Even though the leads didn't appeal to me much, Ravi Kishan as a strict yet compassionate coach and Jimmy Shergill lead the ship through turbulent waves, guarded on the flanks by the flamboyantly shot boxing sequences, with the distance between the boxing ring and the camera getting reduced with every successive bout.

Shot by four cinematographers whose styles are visible in a distinctive manner, reducing the movie to a beautifully fractured bone, Mukkabaaz is a movie which I will return to again, as I am of the opinion that there is something which I've not yet grasped perfectly. It's an honorable attempt, having the nuance to be recognized in a different light in the future. Till then, Mukkabaaz will remain as a bleating sheep amidst a pack of wolves.

Pro:- Performances and Cinematography.
Con:- Screenplay and Music.

Rating:- 3.5/5