"Whenever a monster is born, a goddess must be born as well."
Hello everyone!
I know it's been a while, and I'm sorry for that. Unfortunately, I'm not the kind of rockstar superhuman who can deal with no vacation, but I can honestly say my vacation was PRETTY good, all things considered.
Some would even call it AMAZING.
And now I'm back home!
Catching up on different things and shows and whatnot, because of course I've fallen slightly behind on everything, naturally.
But I also managed to watch some pretty decent movies down there while I was at it, and one of them is tonight's movie of choice.
We're going back to India, baby, in Mardaani 3.
Mardaani 3 continues the story of Shivani Shivaji Roy, the SSP who continues battling law breakers and crime in India and rises through ranks with meteoric speed as well as sheer tenacity. This means she usually also pisses people off but, well, when you're busting apart a women and drug trafficking operation successfully, you're bound to not be everyone's favourite.
Right around this time, the daughter of an Indian diplomat goes missing, and because of her track record, Shivani is asked to oversee the case. She figures out that the daughter was probably taken because she looked like a poor child, given she was playing with the housekeeper's daughter, and that this is a bit of a problem since kidnappers won't call for a ransom if they don't know.
So they set up a trap, announcing the girl's worth a lot, and therefore the kidnappers swipe the girl right out from under the nose of Amma, head of her own little circle of criminals. See, she oversees a beggar network, but why, specifically, she seems to be carting around prepubescent girls between 8 to 10 years old is anyone's guess at this point.
Unfortunately, Shivani's ploy is not a success, and by the time they follow two kidnappers to an organization where someone called Ramanujan happens to be helping fight against crime, well, she's out of options. And when links to Amma are revealed, she takes Ramanujan up on his offer to help, since he knows Amma well, as she's the only crime lord he has yet to put behind bars.
That's all well and good until you see him suffocate the poor girl he was supposed to rescue, and you figure out he's the absolute devil of a man and working WITH Amma, not against her.
But not even Amma personally visiting Shivani at her home is enough to stop her from investigating, even when she's officially off the case. She's starting to think the tunnel she's in is getting much darker still when she discovers a girl who supposedly escaped Amma's clutches, but she's suffering from advanced cervical cancer and dies shortly after. She does, however, point Shivani to one of the trust buildings Ramanujan set up, which pings all her alarms.
Ramanujan is, apparently, not to be trusted, Shivani reasons, because he happens to be a mole and working WITH Amma rather than against her! This is because he used to be a child in her network and she practically raised him, but this complicates matters further.
See, despite having a witness, and despite arresting Amma and Ramanujan both, the star witness dies in his cell, and both the criminals walk, with one of the police officers who worked with Shivani up until that point, Fatima.
They quickly relocate the last batch of girls to Sri Lanka, and while Shivani IS suspended, she decides to hell with it, takes her husband's advice to not let the uniform both define and hold her back, and cooks up her own team on the sly, bringing over some characters from the first two movies, which I thought was lovely.
Even lovelier is that they don't even hesitate: they're all aboard, knowing Shivani's good for it when it matters.
They head to Sri Lanka themselves, helped by the diplomat who lost his daughter earlier, and Shivani kidnaps Amma, revealing that while Ramanujan is Amma's mole, Fatima has ALWAYS been Team Shivani, and orchestrated pretty much everything from her supposed 'defection'.
Shivani visits Ramanujan to barter for the lives of the girls she's trying to save, learning that they're being used as test subjects in illegal testing for cervical cancer drugs. There's a reason tests on humans are forbidden, but Ramanujan doesn't seem to care since the end result is worth the price.
But he agrees to give the girls to Shivani in exchange for Amma, saying he'll just find more subjects (willing or not is the better question). Only problem here is that Amma's already dead, seeing as Shivani shot her to protect her own gunner, but Ramanujan doesn't need to know this until the explosive that Shivan straps onto the corpse goes boom, with a loud bang.
Shivani beats the idiot with a chain and explains that so long as she draws breath, she's never going to sit back and let injustice happen, even to one person only.
She then injects him with the same accelerated and mutated HPV virus he was pumping into the girls, and makes sure he gets to die under strict supervision.
The girls are returned home, Shivani is reinstated in the police force, and she now has the spine to say, you know what? Rich girls and their disappearances shouldn't be the only ones that matter. Considering they have nothing and no one better than her, her superiors agree to five her a special task force, just for her, with freedom to pick and choose her own cases.
The movie ends with the potential for more in the same universe given that Shivani could FINALLY move freely while investigating, with no one trying to clip her wings, but we shall see.
In any event, this is a good, if gruesome movie at times. It's good ALL the time, mind, but gruesome is for the other explanation. Rani Mukerji once again shines in the main role, and you can tell how exasperated she is with the way the world works in just a few words she says.
Brilliant, I tell you!
The supporting cast is lovely, and the plot is just intriguing enough to keep you asking for more, although by the time you get to the virus and mutations and whatnot, there's a high chance you'll need to watch it a second time just to put two and two together. I know I had to, it sounded so convoluted the first time!
Either way, I absolutely love it and absolutely recommend.
xx
*images and video not mine
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