Raees Movie review:
Raees movie review from Times of India:
Raees Story:
Raees Alam runs an illegal alcohol empire in a Gujarat shrouded in prohibition; ACP Majmudar is in charge of toppling him off his high position. Will Raees’s own brand of righteousness save him?
Raees review:
Gear up for a throwback to the great Salim-Javed blockbusters of the Seventies, where the hero grows up mid-action, every second line is meant to show off the character’s swagger, a Helen song (Sunny Leone here) breaks the tension and action sequences compel you to whistle.
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Carrying that legacy forward, is Raees. Shah Rukh Khan plays the titular character of a spectacled goon who hates being called “battery”; he starts from harmless Ponzi schemes but graduates to pre-planned rackets and becomes the top bootlegger of his town. When ACP Majmudar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is posted in his area, he meets his equal. Raees forms a nexus with politicians who fuel his business, but he soon becomes the thorn in their side.
The first half is well-paced; it draws you in and makes you root for the bootlegger; Majmudar’s one-liners and the music whet your appetite and the Laila Main Laila sequence ups the ante. But the second half plunges into a weird Robin Hood zone where the antihero’s morals are suddenly defibrillated and he becomes a messiah. The movie takes a rough path there on, and the long runtime makes the ride bumpier.
Shah Rukh Khan has never looked better; he’s full of fury and for once, isn’t spreading his arms, but breaking others’. The film lies entirely on his shoulders and he carries the weight most of the times. When he doesn’t, the ever-so-reliable Nawazuddin Siddiqui steps in with his crackling performance. In the trademark Nawaz style, he delivers some comic relief while playing the Tom to Khan’s Jerry. Mahirah is restricted to songs and a few emotional scenes, but doesn’t really add much. If her purpose was to soften the baddie, it’s lost on the viewer.
The movie can feel a bit long, but if you’re going for a great Shah Rukh performance and some good ol’ popcorn-entertainment, it might just ‘raees’ to the occasion.
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Raees Movie review by The Indian Express:
Raees movie cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Mahira Khan, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Atul Kulkarni
Raees movie director: Rahul Dholakia
Raees movie rating: 2.5
Shah Rukh Khan returns in and as Raees, a golden hearted mobster who does bad things for a good cause. It is a role constructed to grab back his pole position, and to that end Shah Rukh Khan strains at fulfilling every single point of the In and As trope. He sings and dances, he fights and romances: he also tries to fulfill the outlines of a character.
And that’s where the film gets stuck, between the two stools of restraint and full blown tamasha: the In and As SRK is as familiar as he has ever been, despite the trimmings added on to induce freshness — the gold rimmed glasses, the kohled eyes, the deliberate delivery, and that ‘Scarface’ moment full of guns, arcing bullets and spraying blood– which all actors dream of.
And that’s where the film gets stuck, between the two stools of restraint and full blown tamasha: the In and As SRK is as familiar as he has ever been, despite the trimmings added on to induce freshness — the gold rimmed glasses, the kohled eyes, the deliberate delivery, and that ‘Scarface’ moment full of guns, arcing bullets and spraying blood– which all actors dream of.
Which makes Raees a mish-mash of things we’ve seen before in a plot which owes allegiance to the real life story of a liquor baron who made his pile and his name in dry Gujarat. The filmmakers have denied any similarity but anyone with half an eye can see the overlaps – the ingenuity of a man who could think on his feet (hooch-filled tomatoes!) and cart his maal under the eye of the cop (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who swears to catch him.
In fact, amongst all the effective supporting parts which bouy SRK, it is Nawaz who shines most. His dry, wry one liners, and he has several, have a zing which SRK’s don’t. And in a film where the leading man’s dialogue baazi is meant to wow the crowd, that is telling.
Dholakia knows his Gujarat .
That was clear in his ‘Parzania ‘. There are some flashes of that insider knowledge here too, but you can see how fear of being censored has blunted the edges of this film which could have really lifted off the screen. The riots, both in Mumbai and Gujarat, have a seriously anodyne feel. And the predictable arc of the story weighs the second half down.
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SRK’s romantic interest, Mahira Khan, too is not as fresh as she could have been: the coyness is old Bollywood and in a film which should have embraced its masala roots much more firmly, it just sinks. So does item girl Sunny Leone, who shakes it, shakes it, but raises zero steam.
So this is what we get: a Nawaz who is having the time of his life, and making us crack multiple grins, up against an SRK who breaks through in some moments (especially one in which he shares with his bete noire, when the film shuts everything else down so that we can focus on the duo ) but gets bogged down in florid, seen-too-many-times flourishes in the rest. That brief exchange makes us sigh for what might have been, and I will take it away. There’s some zest in the beginning when we see a winning bunch of boys — the young Raees and his bestie, played by Zeeshan Ayyub — learn the ropes of their ‘ganda dhanda’, but soon enough adulthood is upon them, and so is the slide.
