Matka Review

It takes more than a third of the film for Matka to even mention Matka, the gambling game invented by Vasu (Varun Tej), the ambitious protagonist who rises from nothing to become an Escobar-like figure in 1970s Visakhapatnam. Written and directed by Karuna Kumar, the film is loosely inspired by Ratan Khetri, dubbed the "Matka King" for his gambling empire in the '80s. Vasu conceives Matka after watching a group of labourers spending their hard-earned money on gambling. In a pompous turn, he demonstrates "Matka" to a train car full of passengers who are immediately hooked: if they guess the right numbers, they win 80 times their wager. Like any shrewd gambling game, Vasu bets that regardless of who wins the bet, the house always wins - the "house", of course, being Vasu, his family, and his friends who he enlists in the operation.

But for the yawning stretch before Matka gets introduced, the film does little more than assemble its characters. There's K B Reddy and Nani (Kishore Kumar G), local thugs running shady businesses in Visakhapatnam with big ambitions; Sophia (Norah Fatehi), who is "Nani's keep"; and Vasu, recently out of jail after a ten-year stint for a righteous murder he committed as a juvenile, now eager to make a name for himself.

The trio is locked in a battle for dominance that doesn't always make sense. At one point, Nani, a prominent wheeler-dealer, nearly sacrifices himself to save Vasu from Reddy's bullets. Yet, the scheming and double-crossing among the three main characters rarely unfold in the clever way early hints suggest. Instead, Nani and Reddy drift in and out of the story at random, as do other secondary characters: a CBI officer on Vasu's trail (Naveen Chandra), Vasu's mother who moves in the background like a shadow, and Vasu's wife, who gets a token scene yelling at her husband for his risky business. Like a company with no vision, the film lurches from scene to scene, with abrupt shifts in tone and plot.

Matka echoes last week's Lucky Bhaskar in several ways: both films centre on morally questionable protagonists portrayed as "heroes", and both feature impeccably designed sets evoking post-Independence India. Meenakshi Chaudhary plays the long-suffering wife in both films, and G V Prakash scores both soundtracks. This convergence of talent and themes may be coincidental, but a more cynical critic might see it as a symptom of the industry's trend towards the same, safe formulas.

At least Lucky Bhaskar had internal logic and consistent characterizations. Vasu, on the other hand, is a muddled mix of contradictory ideals. In an early scene, Vasu, forced into a dogfighting match by the prison warden, refuses to throw the game, claiming he'd rather lose money than lose respect. Yet later in life he becomes ruthlessly greedy, undermining his earlier words.

The movie sacrifices Vasu's characterization for style. Some scenes are jarringly dissonant as the movie tries hard to present itself as a portrait of a mafia man. We see Vasu chopping off a lieutenant's hand for cheating. We see him stride through a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with cash from his Matka operations. The movie's hyperbole even extends to a point where Matka's notoreity supposedly reaches the desk of then-PM Indira Gandhi, who's alarmed that "the country's economy will collapse" due to how much money is tied up in the game. A CBI officer even tosses out a laughably improbable stat: that 50% of Indian currency is sunk into Matka. This would be less absurd if we actually saw the game's addictive pull or its widespread impact, but all we get is a rushed montage.

Varun Tej tries hard to embody a believable don, trading his urbane look for a gritty one: he rolls cigars, slices tobacco leaves with the same knife he uses to chop off arms, wears Gucci aviators, slicks his hair back, and stuffs betel leaves under his lip in a clear nod to Vito Corleone, with a gravelly voice to match. But traces of his urbane image remain even in his most raw, thuggish scenes. Kishore Kumar, on the other hand, makes a very convincing villainous figure as Nani, giving off the calm, menacing air of an veteran criminal.

Karuna Kumar's writing is ambitious without substance, much like Vasu himself. The film leans heavily on metaphors, particularly a long-winded one about sheep and a fox that Vasu shares by way of rationalizing his behaviour. There's also an overuse of songs: two "item" numbers, one featuring a disengaged-looking Norah Fatehi, another clumsily attempting a '90s aesthetic, and a third-act number with a gang of thugs that truly tests the audience's patience. Ultimately, Matka is less a cohesive film than a series of scenes pulled from a "Narcos" vision board and rushed into production.