3 minutes of readingJanuary 30, 2026 02:42 pm IST
Mardaani 3 Movie Review: The main difficulty, even with popular franchises, is the scourge of familiarity: how do you construct difference when the main character and his line of work are the same? With Rani Mukherji returning for a third round of Mardaani, her brave cop Shivani Shivaji Roy pitted against a new set of antagonists, we are left struggling to discover new beats.
This time, there’s the formidable human trafficker Amma (Mallika Prasad), whose goons are tasked with picking up prepubescent girls (now that’s a difference) from underprivileged backgrounds. A kidnapping gone wrong in a small UP town resonates in Delhi: The girl’s father is a high official and the police are ordered from above to take strong action.
Cue the entry of Shivani, armed with her faithful assistants, one of them a young woman (Janki Bodiwala) who is struggling to find her head in a workplace overrun by men. Another key character is a young man (Prajesh Kashyap) whose NGO’s stated mission is to rescue street children, and who has been responsible for putting some of the bad guys behind bars. Jisshu Sengupta reprises his role as Shivani’s ultra-supportive husband who doesn’t mind cooking his own dinner while she leaves the house on her business.
Which, like the first two installations, published in 2015 and 2019, focuses on rescuing young women from fates worse than death. In the line of terrifying women whose job it is to traffic girls (the last was Huma Qureshi’s Badi Didi in Delhi Crime 3), the stone-eyed Prasad is vivid, humming a song as she puts her victims to rest. But some of the concern it generates is mitigated by the added gibberish about deadly diseases, viruses, human guinea pigs and greedy medical corporations.
No other character is allowed to be bigger than Roy, which is understandable since she is the heroine of this Yash Raj-produced venture, which is both a good and bad thing. Mukherji is a solid actress and we join her as she leads from the front, with everyone else behind her. But even she can’t do much with the degree of overwriting and predictable plot points: when a character says aap rath chalao, aur mujhe saarthi banne do, or words to that effect, we know exactly where he’s going, just as we do when too-good-to-be-true characters emerge.
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Shivani delivers the obligatory speech about how girls and women are perpetual victims, and how there will always be brave ones to come to the rescue, which is fine, but the rush to put Mukherji center stage – literally in more than one scene – dulls the rest of the enterprise.
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Mardaani 3 Movie Cast: Rani Mukherji, Janki Bodiwala, Mallika Prasad, Prajesh Kashyap, Jisshu Sengupta
Mardaani 3 Movie Director: Abhiraj Minawala
Mardaani 3 Movie Rating: two stars