CDB Musical Production, Anjum Rizvi Film Co., Manoj Adhikari Production and Pugmark Films Pvt. Ltd.’s Maatr (A) is the story of revenge of a wronged woman.
Vidya (Raveena Tandon) is a teacher. One horrific night, she and her school-going daughter, Tia (Alisha Khan), are brutally raped by a gang of men. Vidya’s daughter dies soon after the gang rape but Vidya survives.
Devastated, Vidya seeks justice from the police but she soon realises that the rich and the influential are beyond the law of the land. With no justice coming her way, Vidya decides to seek revenge herself. How she eliminates the rapists one by one is the crux of the story.
Michael Pellico’s story is oft-repeated and does not have even an iota of novelty except that in this, the mother and daughter are raped at the same time and same place. The novelty stops there, after which the revenge drama is pretty much like in any other vendetta film. Michael Pellico’s screenplay, with additional writing by Mishka Singh, Appdeep Meshram and Nishant Singh, is dull, to say the least. Although it is a revenge story, the screenplay is so drab that it fails to really keep the audience engrossed. In fact, the revenge track is also not consistently exciting. For instance, the track of Vidya asking one of her students, Meenal Shrivastav (Amisha Sinha), to kill one of the rapists by getting into a hotel room with him seems weird, maybe even objectionable. Again, the ease with which Vidya successfully seeks revenge makes the plot seem implausible. Dialogues (by Mishka Singh, Appdeep Meshram, Nishant Singh and Michael Pellico) are hardly effective.
Raveena Tandon does a fair job as Vidya, the vendetta woman. Divya Jagdale is quite good as her friend, Ritu. Alisha Khan is effective in the role of Tia. Madhur Mittal performs ably as Apurva Malik. Anurag Arora is so-so as police inspector Shroff. As police officer Akhil, Saheem Khan lends ordinary support. Rushad Rana is average as Vidya’s husband, Ravi Chauhan. Nitin Sharma (as Inder Jangra), Piyush Kaushik (as Sikandar Beniwal), Pranav Brara (as Sophian Khan), Sutinder Singh (as Mama), Bhuvan Kaila (as Harshit Poojary) and Ishan Bhatt (as Kamran Qureshi) provide the necessary support.
Ashtar Sayed’s direction is routine. Music (Fuzon and Kavita Seth) and lyrics (Munawwar Rana, Swanand Kirkire and S.K. Khalish) are functional. Utkarsh Dhotekar’s background music is not very impactful. Hari K. Vedantam’s cinematography is alright. Vikram Dahiya’s action and stunt scenes are good. Ashish Porwal’s art direction hardly deserves separate mention. Editing (by Girish Verma and Manoj Magar) is loose.
On the whole, Maatr will go largely unnoticed as it is too routine to entertain.