Maidaan Review: Ajay Devgn’s Sporting Attempt Fails to Score

Director: Amit Sharma

Writers: Saiwyn Quadras, Aman Rai, Atul Shahi, Ritesh Shah, Siddhant Mago, Amit Sharma

Cast: Ajay Devgn, Priyamani, Gajraj Rao, Rudranil Ghosh, Chaitanya Sharma, Madhur Mittal, Tejas Ravishankar, Amartya Ray

Duration: 181 mins

Available in: Theatres

You can almost touch the blood, sweat and tears involved in the making of Maidaan, the biographical sports drama directed by Amit Ravindranath Sharma (Badhaai Ho). It tells the story of Syed Abdul Rahim, the iconic coach who revolutionised Indian football during his time with the national team. The film opens with India’s infamous 10-1 “barefeet” drubbing at the hands of Yugoslavia in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics – and covers a decade of Rahim’s life, all the way through the triumphs and tribulations of the 1962 Asian Games. It features some of the best sports choreography since the hockey matches of Chak De! India (2007). You can tell that the film loves the visual tempo of football. It loves the tropes of underdog storytelling. It loves the period-movie template. 

But the undoing of Maidaan is that the film is in love with itself. The 181-minute journey is so stuffed with vain melodrama and narrative stepovers that it keeps admiring its posture in the mirror. (Cue Cristiano Ronaldo pun). It puts the “Main” (I) in Maidaan, which is ironic, given that teamwork is the ultimate goal of the sport. As a result, it’s like watching an endless penalty shootout; even the transitions are slow. The comparisons with Chak De are inevitable. A maverick coach assembles a squad of young rookies from across the country. He smells like team spirit – pressing on the importance of “India” over Bengal or Hyderabad. He faces hostility and resistance from within the system. They defy a cynical establishment to surprise everyone on the world stage. The tournament flow is familiar, too: India is humiliated by the favourites in the first game only to play them again in the final. Rahim walks out to touch the grass on the eve of the match. The game itself unfolds like a mini-film, merging war-scene camerawork with football physicality to create an immersive experience. The players aren’t kicking and sprinting anymore, they’re sacrificing their souls and bodies. The detailing is neat: They’re so consumed by the battle that they don’t even hear the final whistle. They remain possessed, until they see their opponents stop moving. 

Adding Unnecessary Hurdles and Obstacles

Most sports biopics count on the audience to mistake the rousing source material for rousing storytelling. Where Maidaan repeatedly falls short, however, is in its big-picture overkill. The bloated screenplay doesn’t trust the inherent context of the film. Given the country’s historical struggles with the sport, the very idea of a ‘Golden Age of Indian football’ raises the stakes. There’s also the matter of a Muslim man shaping the identity of post-Partition India; the politics and prejudice in the boardroom are driven by male ego as well as cultural prejudice. At one point, a powerful naysayer even mocks the ‘democracy’ of the process when Rahim is voted back in as the coach. The odds are inbuilt and self-explanatory; you don’t need too many external hurdles and villains. But Maidaan does precisely that. It stacks the odds so hard that, short of a nuclear apocalypse or a bomb disguised as the ball, there is no obstacle left to overcome. 

For starters, Rahim’s lung cancer defines his comeback. Painfully long shots of him coughing dot the latter parts of the film. Apart from the one nice touch (where the disease forces him to return to his family while a song called “Ghar Aaya Mera Mirza” plays), the man’s suffering does the work of the background score — it goes on and on and on. Then there’s the football federation office filled with cackling Bengali bureaucrats stuffing their gobs with singaras (samosas). Its president (a hammy Rudranil Ghosh) puts animated baddie Dick Dastardly to shame. There’s a cigar-smoking sports journalist (Gajraj Rao) whose bitterness towards Rahim is random in a film afraid of social commentary. So the excuse here is that he is slighted by Rahim’s cold riposte (featuring an Elvis Presley quote) in their first meeting. The two live-action cartoons vow to finish Indian football for reasons that remain unclear. They want to maintain Calcutta’s dominance and erase Rahim’s Hyderabadi influence, but even this regional bias is lost in translation. Imagine if Chak De had turned the Anjan Srivastava-played federation boss into the antagonist so that his presence at the end – his admiring and chastened glances at the coach – amplifies the hero’s redemption arc. It’s a copout, because characters like Kabir Khan, Syed Abdul Rahim and their handcrafted teams don’t require such crutches to glorify their achievements. 

Selling the Handicap

In other words, Maidaan constantly asks: Is winning really winning if it doesn’t involve a dying coach on the sidelines, an injured goalkeeper, a semifinal clash where the rival manager looks like he’s faking a heart-attack rather than reacting to the game, a riot outside the stadium, a finance ministry that hesitates to fund the trip, and an evil scribe and his sycophant making faces in the crowd? It’s an extension of another rhetorical question: Can a film – or any work of art – really be understood if you don’t acknowledge the blood, sweat and tears behind it? This line of thought ties into the persecution complex that bookmarks most national achievements: Victory is useless if it isn’t attached to victimhood. This story, too, is so focused on selling the handicap that it fails to forge its own merit. 

It’s why most of the genre tropes ring hollow. The training montage in Maidaan is accompanied by a terribly bland anthem called “Team India Hai Hum”. The recruitment montage seems to be abandoned midway through. The staging and visual effects (VFX) – the packed stadiums, the skies, the exotic backdrops of Rome, Jakarta or even Bombay’s Oval Maidan – evoke the artifice of a Zack Snyder universe. The opponents (special mention to the Australian coach who virtually sings out his insults) are one-note stereotypes. The soundtrack is jarring. The film’s version of Chak De’s famous “Sattar minute” speech revolves around the number one (“ek”) – which is fitting, because the wordplay deserves one star. The Indian commentators shuffle between calling the matches, narrating the screenplay, and mansplaining the sport of football. And last but not least, the performances lack the impact of the legacies. The personalities of a few household names (PK Bannerjee, Chuni Goswami, Peter Thangaraj) aside, the acting is limited to the field. The supporting cast does a decent job as players, but they don’t transcend the collective din of a team. 

Yet, it’s the seniors that stumble. Devgn’s turn is so muted – the voice modulation and body language so inhibited – that Rahim barely registers as a football coach. He almost disappears into his stoicness. There is no context to Rahim’s passion for the game, and no evidence of his managerial skills other than a lone moment of him schooling a star striker. He chain-smokes like someone who knows he’s going to get lung cancer, with the cigarettes looking like forced props in the first half. The sullen gaze gets a bit repetitive; the only time the protagonist looks alive is when he’s coughing up a storm. The film fares slightly better than him, if only because football – a solid metaphor for life – elevates the climax. Which is to say: Maidaan scores in stoppage time, but it isn’t enough to salvage the scoreline. A thrilling finish doesn’t always amount to victory. Sometimes, it’s just a slimmer margin of defeat.