Mukkabaaz

“Massive complications, but Kashyap tackles them with a superbly light touch, throwing in crowdpleasing lines and lyrics as well as an overall front-bencher approach that genuinely made me whistle.”

Rating: 5 stars | Full review

“Casteism, nationalism, nepotism, favourtism, cynicism, corruption, parental pressure and regional politics inform much of this film. Which is why this isn’t really a sports movie, but an “Indian sports” movie – a distinct genre of storytelling that must circle an entire culture in order to arrive at its competitive central theme.”

Rating: 3 stars | Full review

“The movie has more in common with Creed than Rocky, and attempts to emulate the spirit of the 2015 sequel rather than Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 breakout feature about a working-class boxer, but without Creed’s clearly delineated commentary on race and the sport.”

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“With Mukkabaaz, the director is back in his zone, reflecting contemporary society and its fault-lines, in a film which melds sports, romance, gender, disability, caste, class… did I leave something out?”

Rating: 3 stars | Full review

“Mukkabaaz turns out to be exactly the sort of film you’d expect from an expansive crew… There are more ideas per scene than is strictly necessary, more targets than can possibly be hit. The narrative is messy, chaotic; it has that off-the-cuff feel that Kashyap last nailed in Gangs of Wasseypur. There’s an unflagging energy to the whole enterprise, a cinematic fidgetiness that extends to the camerawork and the cutting and the topics of discussion picked up and discarded almost too fast to register. It isn’t difficult to imagine Kashyap on set grabbing whoever was nearby, asking them what they thought of a scene, and running with their suggestions.”

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“Mukkabaaz marks Kashyap’s fab return to a realm he understands and expresses best — with all its flaws, angst and humour, Tarantino-esque pop-culture references, making it all as distressing as it is frickin’ fun and real.”

Rating: 4 stars | Full review

“As I exited the theatre after watching Mukkabaaz, I wondered, will any actor this year be able to top what Vineet Kumar Singh has done in this film? There is of course the remarkable physical transformation – his granite body seems built to be punished in ring. But even greater, the internal transformation.”

Rating: 3 stars | Full review

“You walk out of Mukkabaaz feeling good about yourself, but unlike Kashyap’s best pictures, it releases you from the responsibility of seeing yourself in it; the movie is darn clever, most of the way, but it hardly has any wisdom… Mukkabaaz is Kashyap’s most crowd-pleasing film after Dev D, and while there’s enough inventiveness packed between frames, it is primarily a movie for the easy moralists. He has sold out in style.”

Rating: 2.5 stars | Full review