Maximum Movie Reviews

Kabeer Kaushik made an impressive debut in 2005 with the textured Lucknow-set police drama Sehar (meaning ‘dawn’), featuring Arshad Warsi in a quietly intense performance that ought to have got him many more lead roles. Kaushik’s next two films—the Bobby Deol-starrer Chamku (2008) and the trying-to-be-comic Hum, Tum aur Ghost (2010)—have been forgettable. This week, the director returns to our screens with another police drama

First let’s just get Maximum’s main, mean seduction out of the way. Sonu Sood has taken a long time since we met him last as Dabangg’s Chedi Singh, but he has finally arrived. Sood (Sonu just doesn’t do him justice) here is not the dumb muscle man you may recall. He is lean, long and limber, with soulful eyes and a sensuous smile. Though Sood has a nice body and is insanely dishy in some scenes, it’s the whole package that works wonders

Mumbai! Yeah, sure! The city of dreams and disasters. Traffic and terrorism. Slums and skyscrapers. Bollywood and bhais. Corruption and 'cop'ulation. Cutting chai and 'cut-pieces'. The city of extremes. It's maxed out - Mumbai. It's raging war against the underbelly of the city. Two daredevil encounter cops, Pratap Pandit (Sonu Sood) and Arun Inamdar ( Naseeruddin Shah) are on a mission to shoot-at-sight. Ready to gun down anything (pointlessly) - but their power, ego and mean motives

With a kind of brisk business-like immediacy and the least amount of fuss, “Maximum” takes us into the world of shoot-out killings and the internecine war in Mumbai`s police department which threatens to destroy the very institution built to mend the wounds and fissures in the social fabric.

Trigger-happy Mumbai cops gunning for gory glory have been the subject of many a Bollywood action flick of the past decade and a bit. This one promises the maximum. Does it deliver? Not quite. Maximum bites off far more than it can comfortably chew. The film is primarily about the power struggles that rage in the innards of the Mumbai police force and the heavy toll of life and limb the battles take, both in the immediate context

Cops hop, spin like tops, even as your interest in them drops. You’re back in those encounter skirmishes days — kicking off in the year 2003 — when arbitrary killings of underworld denizens, in the backalleys of Mumbai, had become as common as a bout of flu. Aachhoo. To be fair, director Kabeer Kaushik’s Maximum, does kick off promisingly, with a script that seems to be inspired by the chequered careers of the so-deemed “encounter specialists” Pradeep Sharma

Can we all agree that Bollywood has squeezed as much cinema as is humanly possible out of Mumbai’s infamous encounter cops, their weasel-faced informers and the police-politician-builder-underworld nexus? Can these subjects be embargoed for the next five years so that viewers get a break from grim men gunning down other grim men in dark alleys? And while we are at it, let’s ban girls jiggling in dance bars too. In Maximum, director Kabeer Kaushik takes all of the above

A large number of movies with the protagonist as a cop have made it to the Hindi screen. A few remain etched in your memory to this day. Besides, many straight-out-of-life incidents are gradually finding their way on the big screen, which clearly indicates Hindi cinema's gradual move towards realistic films. Set in Mumbai in early 2000, MAXIMUM, helmed by Kabeer Kaushik, focuses on two cops and their journey and struggle for power

Kabeer Kaushik’s Maximum, oscillating between docu-drama and action thriller, lands up somewhere between the two and nowhere in particular. The story is predictable, the screenplay lacklustre and the characters undercooked. There was potential for the film to be a taut cop drama -- despite the seen-before encounter specialist angle -- but it ends up as a cop-out. You’ll be counting the minutes before the film reaches culmination, one that’s far from satisfying

Wonder why this film is called Maximum? You go to watch the film with a certain set of expectations: many intense face-offs between its lead characters (Sonu Sood and Naseeruddin Shah), a taut drama about the delivery of justice, the corruption in the police department and lots of action. Instead, we have two trigger-happy cops, wanting to out-do each other’s encounter count in a barely-there plot, mouthing lukewarm dialogues and the inevitable

Naseeruddin Shah who plays an encounter specialist in the film substantiates his seniority by citing the exact number of his encounters as 56. Unfortunately Kabeer Kaushik's encounter-specialist story 'Maximum' doesn't even come up with an original figure on the encounter count and rather derives it from the cult film in the genre - Ab Tak Chhappan (56). More unfortunately, Bollywood has encountered the quintessential encounter specialist so many times

Mumbai. Inter-cop rivalry. Encounter specialists. Mob bosses. Complicit policemen. This combination has occurred in movies too numerous to name. What brought me to 'Maximum' with some anticipation was the memory of the director’s debut ‘Sehar’, which took all of the above ingredients, minus Mumbai, and turned them into a memorable film, well-acted, well-etched, visceral, with songs that added to the flavour. But 'Maximum' turns out to be a dampener

Mumbai. Inter-cop rivalry. Encounter specialists. Mob bosses. Complicit policemen. This combination has occurred in movies too numerous to name. What brought me to 'Maximum' with some anticipation was the memory of the director’s debut ‘Sehar’, which took all of the above ingredients, minus Mumbai, and turned them into a memorable film, well-acted, well-etched, visceral, with songs that added to the flavour. But 'Maximum' turns out to be a dampener

Maximum performances. Minimum impact. Cast: Sonu Sood, Naseeruddin Shah, Neha Dhupia, Vinay Pathak, Aarya Babbar,Anjana Sukhani, Swanand Kirkire ,......

A thriller about the power struggles within the Mumbai police force and the repercussions of such cops-versus-cops clashes, Maximum, directed by Kabeer Kaushik is an interesting idea that sadly doesn’t translate into a coherent film. Only Sonu Sood performs earnestly, but he's let down by a humorless script. He deserved better. Opening in 2003 when the police had more or less weeded out underworld elements from the city, the film recounts the rivalry between two encounter cops

The film opens with the word MAXIMUMBAI, suggesting either a superheroic clean-up lady or a city inundated by unminiskirts. Lamentably enough, Kabeer Kaushik's cop thriller is neither of those potentially fun things, and not even really a thriller. It's a pity, for Kaushik's Sehar remains one of the most solid cop movies in recent years. This one, however, tries too hard to appear 'intelligent,' which is why voices are softened and conversations are made matter-of-fact

MAXIMUM is the story of two encounter specialists wanting to complete domain of the shootout territory. At least that is what I gather from the little that I am able to grasp of Kabir Kaushik's latest cop caper, set in the year 2003, which culminates in 2008. The director focuses only on style and loses out on substance. The story is told at staccato pace, between gun shots. The encounter specialists, we are given to understand, have fallen apart after once working together

It’s Mumbai circa 2003 and the police have their grip hold on the city thanks to their ruthless encounter killings. Pratap Pandit (Sonu Sood) heads his team of policemen, informers and small time thugs in cleaning up the crime syndicate in Mumbai and filling his pocket as well. Another cop trying to beat Pratap at the number game is the senior police officer Arun Inamdar (Naseeruddin Shah). While Pratap has the support of minister Tiwari

We call them cinematic liberties. The term basically means that a film’s script can change the reality portrayed on the big screen. When we go for a Bollywood film, our brain is trained not to react adversely when we see a hero taking down five people with a single blow or flying through the air only to land a kick that in turn sends another villain flying through the air. But what happens when we are told that the story is actually a real story? Nah!

Contrary to popular belief, this film isn’t about a nighty-clad mother (maxi-mum). It is about Aamchi Mumbai- the maximum city. But director Kabeer Kaushik’s film takes minimum interest in Suketu Mehta’s interpretation of the city and if anything, only curdles it into a milkshake of clichés. So Mumbai isn’t about the ‘Mum-bhais’ anymore. It’s about trigger-happy encounter cops, dance bars which can’t be distinguished from item song shoots