When the trailer of the movie Mr. & Mrs. Mahi was released, there were these comments that sort of talked about how the film was glorifying the manipulative husband as a motivator. The only good thing about this Sharan Sharma film was how it presented the hero as a selfish and manipulative person who was desperate for validation. The rest of this movie is a familiar template that gets uneven tweaks, which is struggling very much to create empathy towards any of the main characters. With every line having these on your face tone, Mr. & Mrs. Mahi is an underwhelming attempt to revamp a formula.
Mahendra Aggarwal was a cricket player who tried hard to get selected and pursue a cricket career. But his father didn’t really give him many chances, and he was forced to sit at the counter of his father’s sports shop. Years later, when he got married to Mahima Aggarwal, a doctor, he found out that she also shared a great love for cricket. When the comeback possibilities for Mahendra became impossible, he decided to give wings to his dreams through Mahima by coaching her and making her a star player. What we see in Mr. & Mrs. Mahi is the journey of this Mahi couple.
The initial portions of the movie that show the downfall of Mahendra as a player, how affected he was by his father’s behavior, and how his honesty impressed Mahima, etc., had that charm to its credit, and it will give you a feeling that writers Sharan Sharma and Nikhil Mehrotra would add a sense of life to whatever that will happen after that. But from the moment Mr. Mahi decides to make a comeback, the cinematic liberty and dramatization are messing up the film. The sports movie database knowledge of the audience would make them predict every move in the tale, and there was rarely a moment in the movie that felt surprising.
The plot development that happens in the second half is so full of cliches that I found myself frowning way too much as every beat becomes highly guessable. The cricketing phase of the film goes into autopilot mode, and you are just waiting for the movie to reach that climax we all knew the moment we saw the trailer. The validation-seeking nature of Mahendra was supposed to take the film to a grey zone where you should have felt empathy towards him despite knowing that his actions were not correct. But the writing just can’t crack that grey despite having someone like Rajkummar Rao. The moment Zarina Wahab starts to console him you just know that this character is going to use the selfless mother trope to convince him.
Rajkummar Rao as the broken Mahendra Aggarwal is really good. You would just feel for the character as nobody understands his passion for the game. But when the writing fizzles in the second half and puts the character in an extremely dark shade with childish reasoning, even Rao struggles to find a smoother transition. Janhvi Kapoor is confident when she is playing the confident portions of the character. But when the character is pretty heartbroken in the last quarter of the movie, her dialogue delivery is struggling. Kumud Mishra, as the hero’s father, is a little too loud, and it felt like they were spoon-feeding the audience how toxic he was as a father.
On a conceptual level, Mr. & Mrs. Mahi is trying to find a balance between a man’s evolution and a couple’s journey to find happiness. But the film is clueless about where to emphasize more to bring out the right emotion. After establishing the characters smoothly in the first act, the film just crumbles due to its inability to reinvent the cliched scripting tropes.
After establishing the characters smoothly in the first act, the film just crumbles due to its inability to reinvent the cliched scripting tropes.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
