Raid Movie Review: This Period Thriller Rides Purely on Ajay Devgn's Star-Power and Saurabh Shukla's Firepower

Raid, directed by Raj Kumar Gupta, stars Ajay Devgn, Ileana D'Cruz and Saurabh Shukla in the lead. This is the first time Rajkumar Gupta is directing Devgn in a movie. Gupta had made brilliant movies like Aamir and No One Killed Jessica at the start of the career, but a tepid Ghanchakkar nearly derailed his career. Devgn's last movie Baadshaho was an average fare. Can Raid turn out to be that much-needed pot of gold for both of them? Well, read ahead to find out,

Raid is set in 1981 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh and begins with Amey Patnaik and his IT team leaving their office to raid an influential bigwig in Sitapur, Rameshwar Singh aka Rajaji (Saurabh Shukla). The movie then takes us a month back, as we get to properly know Amey, a rule-loving honest officer who has the guts to take on the big fishes with no worries. Even a concerned wife (Ileana D'Cruz) and the innumerable transfers don't deter him from straying from his line of duty. As he takes charge of his new posting in Lucknow, Amey gets hints from secret informant about the hordes of black money at Rajaji's 'White House'. And the wheels get rolling…

Though Raid is a fictional movie, it is inspired by two real-life incidents that happened in the '80s. Now we have seen IT raids being carried out in movies, with Special 26 coming to my mind first (even if it was conducted by a fake team). But having a whole movie set around a single raid and make it engaging throughout is not an easy feat to pull off.

The problem of black money has been hounding our country for years. The recent Nirav Modi scam and the raids being conducted on Karthi Chidambaram's properties have put a lot of spotlight on our country's IT department. So Raid had come out at a good time and has a lot going on for it.

By bringing in heavyweight actors like Ajay Devgn and Saurabh Shukla and putting them at loggerheads, we expect a lot of masala in the proceedings, which Raid fulfils to some extent. However you can't help but feel that the efforts could have been better considering the premise in hand.

The first quarter of the movie is quite middling, when Raid tries to give us more insight on Amey's nature and his love for rules. He is a man who wouldn't get into a club that doesn't let patrons without shoes, because you know, rules. It's another matter that he later bends a rule for the antagonist to add drama to the proceedings, while throwing in a little dirt on the political regime of that era. There is also a forced romantic song with his wife, just so that Ileana could justify her screen-presence in her movie.

The movie actually comes alive when the said 'raid' begins and we get to meet the power-crazy, arrogant Rajaji and his equally vile family. These portions, more in the first half, make for some entertaining sequences. Be it Patnaik's rule-book briefing to the family or Rajaji's sly warnings to Patnaik, you have a lot to look forward to here. There is a simmering tension when Patnaik's team fails to unearth anything (at first) and we are really curious to know more. Was the information true? If so, who was that informant and what was his/her motive?

As you keep your eyes peeled on the screen and your butts at the edge of the seat, here drops another romantic song and the momentum is broken. We wish the movie would have done with any of the scenes involving the officer's wife and would just focus on the raid. Even when it does, the cracks make their presence felt and threaten to carve potholes into the movie. There is a moment to cheer when Patnaik's team makes their first breakthrough (not a spoiler, as the scene is there in the trailer itself) and you hope things will change for the better.

It does and then it doesn't.

One of the main victims of this Raid's wavering narrative is Rajaji's family. They start off on an interesting arc when we realise that everyone in the family is as morally corrupt as the patriarch. There is a scene-stealing granny who is the highlight. How can you not love this woman who slaps one of her sons, asking him why they didn't treat their father when they had so much money? But as the movie progresses, nearly everyone turns out to be dumb characters of a badly-written family soap.

Thankfully Rajaji is the movie's most fleshed out and entertaining character, boosted by Saurabh Shukla's terrific performance.  Every scene that has this man in the centre enlivens the proceedings. From throwing shade at Patnaik to feeding jalebi to his mother to wondering who is the Vibhishana in his clan, Shukla is a treat to watch. The dialogues, especially written for Rajaji, helps a lot in making an enigma out of this man.

Much of the blame for the movie's flaws definitely falls on Raj Kumar Gupta's unconvincing direction, though Ritesh Shah's otherwise promising script is not fully guilt-free either. Because the whole setup is fictional, we don't really feel the realism after some time. Instead, if the makers had actually based the movie on one of the incidents they mentioned in the final credits, Raid could have been a riveting watch throughout. Certain real-life political allusions could have been avoided, considering the lead actor's political leanings are well-known. Even if we give it to them the opportunity to criticise the corruption in the politics, the movie still has a timid, gutless approach towards pointing out where we went wrong.

The climax, where Rajaji's men barge into the house wanting to attack the team, could have been a tense situation. But it leads to a tepid conclusion ruined by yet another song playing in the background. Even the suspenseful reveal of the informant turn out to be a damp squib, as the makers try to replicate Drishyam here.

Talking about the performances, Ajay Devgn is decent and he nearly matches Saurabh Shukla's gallery-serving performance. It's only that we have seen him do much, much better before. Ileana D'Cruz is not bad (she even gets two clapworthy dialogues); she is, unfortunately, served with poorly written scenes. Amit Sial is really good as the morally ambiguous team member of Patnaik, though the movie avoids to capitalise on that ambiguity later. The rest of the cast are quite okay.

Yay!

- Saurabh Shukla, and the dialogues written for him

- A fine concept

- Decent performances from the rest of the cast, including Ajay Devgn

- Some firepower in the raid sequences

- A short runtime

Nay! 

- An uneven narrative

- All Ajay-Ileana sequences

- A flawed approach to real-life political allusions

- Unwarranted songs

- A tepid climax (and reveal of the suspense)

Final thoughts

Raid has an interesting setup that makes for quite a decent one time watch, thanks to the performances, Rajaji's villainous character and the promising buildup in the raid scenes. However, it had the potential to achieve much more if it hadn't relied on too much on Ajay Devgn's starpower and instead focused more on the script. In the end, this Raid fails to bring in the bright returns we had expected when it started digging into Rajaji's house.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 15, 2018 11:00 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).