‘Raid’ film review: This crusade against black money has its moments

Income Tax department officer Amey Patnaik’s halo and wings are revealed early on in Raid. Amey (Ajay Devgn) refuses to enter an elite club that insists on closed shoes rather than open footwear (the rulebook must be followed, after all). When his host buys him a pair to enable his entry, he pays for the purchase.

Inside the club, Amey concedes to a drink – but from his own stash. I only consume what I can afford to buy, he declares. The halo twinkles, and the wings wobble in noble glee.

Despite – or actually because of – his heavily underlined heroism, the Ray-Ban sporting Amey turns out to be the least interesting character in Raj Kumar Gupta’s movie, his first after the disappointing comedy Ghanchakkar (2013). Raid tries too hard to push Amey’s case, and gives him many aphoristic lines that enlist him as a life-time member of the movie club of honest government officials who knock heads with corrupt politicians. Amey’s character doesn’t take a single step forward from when we first meet him, but other twists and tensions in Ritesh Shah’s screenplay work better.

The opening scenes have several close-ups of a wristwatch, but the movie doesn’t stick to its own promised deadline, stretching events out over an indefinable time period. The premise proves too slim for the 121-minute duration, and the frequent cutaways to Amey’s impossibly glamorous and simpering wife Malini (Ileana D’Cruz) have no place in the plot. Perhaps no other income tax raid has taken a pause or two for a song, and Malini’s presence, which is meant to exemplify Amey’s belief that the wives of honest government officials need to be equally brave, only interrupt the momentum.

Yet, Raid coasts along on some smart ideas, among which is the suggestion that compared to the present-day rampaging corruption and brazen looting of public sector banks, the 1980s were a better place to be. The movie is set in 1981, before multi-crore scams became weekly occurrences. Acting on a tip-off that Rameshwar Singh (Saurabh Shukla) has tonnes of black money stashed in his sprawling mansion, Amey assembles his team for an early morning raid that runs into the next day. The raiding team finds nothing despite ripping up mattresses and upturning idols, but luck begins to smile on Amey as the interval sets in.

Gupta works hard to inject a thriller quality to a cinema-unfriendly plot. Dark hints are dropped about a mole in Rameshwar Singh’s household, and his attempts to lobby for succor with former prime minister Indira Gandhi move the action out of the mansion, where much of the movie is set.