Madhuri Dixit Starrer Tries To Be Woke Without Really Opening The Eyes!

Xtreme Vogue Islamabad Desk: Sidra Yusuf

Maja Ma Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Madhuri Dixit, Gajraj Rao, Ritwik Bhowmik, Srishti Shrivastava, Rajit Kapoor, Sheeba Chaddha & Simone Singh

Director: Anand Tiwari

Maja Ma Movie Review Out! (Pic Credit: Poster)

What’s Good: It teaches you to like whatever you want to & hence it’s also okay to dislike this!

What’s Bad: It’s THE Madhuri Dixit after all and you do feel bad for her.

Loo Break: Just be there for that one twist in the initial 20 minutes, post that the cinema hall is an open jungle for you to transfer as much loo as you can.

Watch or Not?: If you are a Madhuri Dixit fan, watch Devdas and even that’s less sad than what has happened here.

Available On: Theatrical Release

Runtime: 134 Minutes

User Rating:

Our NRI residing in the States Jas (Ritwik Bhowmik) gets ready while having the ‘wifi-dahi’ with his mother Pallavi (Madhuri Dixit) from India because it’s a ritual we Indians follow before attending an important event. What’s that event in Jas’ life? Is he applying for a Green card? Is he getting a promotion? Is he smuggling an iPhone 14 Ultra Max Pro from the US to India?

Nope, he’s going for a lie-detector test which will ‘prove’ his love for his girl Esha’s (Barkha Singh) ‘millionaire’ parents Bob (Rajit Kapoor) & Pam Hansraj (Sheeba Chaddha) who btw are extremely close to Donald Trump, so close that he doesn’t even mess up while taking Bob’s full name. Hansrajs fly to India to face off against Patels highlighting the class divide, only to land on a revelation that Jas’ mother is a [Spoiler Ahead] lesbian. All the chaos that follows this revelation not only ridicules an interesting plot but also tests your patience for another 2 hours.

Maja Ma Movie Review: Script Analysis

Anand Tiwari directs Sumit Batheja’s quarter-baked story, yep, it doesn’t even reach halfway for me to use the traditional term. Barring the ‘lie detector’ portion, the film starts on a brilliant note with two opposite families coming face to face to make ‘adjustments’ for their kids to marry. Pallavi’s surprising revelation scene isn’t even concluded properly to carry forward the emotional baggage to the next scene.

And this isn’t the only scene which faces this dilemma as a certain character reveals his wife is suffering from Skin Cancer & that’s been brushed off like humanity after Covid. The character listening to this sob story not only ignores it but also keeps it hidden from his wife who is the Skin Cancer Patient’s best friend. I know it’d be hard to decode this but I don’t want to give out the spoilers along with telling how rudimentary the writing gets at places.

Debojeet Ray somewhere follows a similar template to this one as Meenakshi Sundareshwar tries to heavily focus on making the places look beautiful around these actors.

Laxmi Keluskar’s classy production design helps Debo Da to play with natural light & colours.

If you thought 130 odd minutes won’t bother you much, Sanyukta Kaza’s editing is here to change that notion.

Maja Ma Movie Review: Star Performance

The world out there would want you to believe that this is Madhuri Dixit‘s ‘best’ & she has hit the ball out of the park but I will humbly ask them to shut up because it’s nowhere even near being her best. It’s totally on how her character was written, but she seemed a lot restrained & restricted to give a better performance.

Gajraj Rao faces some hits, and some misses while riding this roller coaster ride of drama & humour. He takes every single chance to make you laugh, but a lot of them are written poorly to even speak it out loud.

Ritwik Bhowmik & Srishti Shrivastava lend decent support as the brother-sister duo, again facing weak character arcs to get yourself emotionally invested in. Rajit Kapoor & Sheeba Chaddha take revenge from Donald Trump for destroying Hindi by ruining the accent of their language in a way no one can ever predict. Simone Singh gets the most humane character to herself & if this focused on Kanchan-Lallavi more than 50-year-old hiding his bon*r with a sheet, it would’ve gotten somewhere better than this.

Maja Ma Movie Review: Direction, Music

Anand Tiwari doesn’t justify the crux of the story more than what it’s at the core. The story decides to stay woke without really opening the eyes properly. It does highlight inclusivity, societal pressure, gender acceptance & more such social issues but doesn’t master a single of them.

Projects like Modern Love: Mumbai, and Welcome Zindagi, really tell you why composer Soumill Shringarpure decided to go with The Yellow Diary’s Buniyaad 2.0 which sets the dramatic filter right. Arijit Singh, Asees Kaur’s Kacchi Doriyaan tries hard to be O Saathi Rey from Kapoor & Sons but fails to do so.

Maja Ma Movie Review: The Last Word

All said and done, Maja Ma takes off a high flight which really gets turbulent forcing an emergency landing. This topic either required better sensitivity or class-apart humour, it has neither!

Two stars!