Who doesn’t admire MS Dhoni? Bhumika Chawla asked that in an interview, and she wasn’t being cute. For a country that waited twenty-eight years for a World Cup, the last-ball six in 2011 did not land in the stands. It landed in the national nervous system. In a hall that sounded like a stadium, I sat with my fists clenched and waited to see what Neeraj Pandey’s authorised biopic would do with that man.
What it does well, it does early. The Ranchi passages are not “untold” in any investigative sense, but they are felt: a cautious father, a devout mother, a sister who believes first, friends who treat Mahi’s talent as a neighbourhood public good. When a boy on a bicycle shouts “Mahi maar raha hai,” the street rearranges itself. That is small-town India in one image — not postcard, not parody.
Sushant Singh Rajput does the rest. He does not impersonate Dhoni so much as occupy the stillness around him: the walk, the half-smile, the way the body loosens only when a bat is in hand. The railway-job stretch is the film’s best acting, because it is the least heroic. Father’s joy at a government post is believable. Son’s first day — reluctance, shame, the sensation of being the wrong animal in the wrong field — is better than any helicopter shot the movie later stacks in a hurry.
Then the film remembers it is a commercial sports biopic and starts behaving like one. Rain, accusation, a moving train, voice-over: the first half slams the brakes with every device the “masses” are assumed to require. There is even the international sports-movie staple, a mentor conversation at a station. Pandey can write a line. He cannot always resist underlining it.
The larger problem is design. MS Dhoni: The Untold Story refuses the usual rise-fall-rise of the genre only by refusing difficulty. Controversies are not weighed; they are absent. Teammates’ names are muted when Dhoni speaks them. We never learn what the dressing room thought of the wicketkeeper-captain, or what the captain thought of them. A single invented moment of pavilion tension, even a joke that felt like a team’s private language, would have given the saint some company. The film is Dhoni’s pride project. Fine. Pride without friction is a brochure.
The second half is where the brochure thickens. Two romance tracks arrive in a clump, undercooked and long. Sakshi’s introduction could have sold soap. In a biopic it is padding. Writers Pandey and Dilip Jha know Dhoni’s private life matters to him; they do not know when devotion becomes indulgence. Side figures — a sponsor with a speech, a drinking friend, a pal who reappears after fame — walk on, emit warmth, and leave no dent. Dhoni’s birth-date confusion is a scene with nowhere to go. The first girlfriend is haloed so early that the “twist” is a rumour the film has already confirmed.
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Editing does not hide the rush. Physical continuity slips. The honeymoon has barely settled before the World Cup final is upon you, as if the years between were an inconvenience. Sanjay Chowdhury’s score is theatrical and, to its credit, often useful; it manufactures pulse where the cut has none. Armaan Malik’s songs get little room except ‘Besabriyaan’. Sudhir Palsane’s camera, especially before the interval, is the quiet professional in the room.
Around Rajput, the cast is serviceable. Kiara Advani is adequate; Disha Patani does the assignment; Bhumika Chawla has presence and almost no part beyond the television glow. Kumud Mishra and Rajesh Sharma work whereas Anupam Kher is doing the father he has done too often. The film needed a different register from Kher, not another sermon-serving dad.
And yet the thing is likable, which is not nothing. It was built to warm a patriotic chest, and it does. Reliving 2011 with Rajput’s face grafted onto the night — the VFX is cleaner than you expect — is cheap and effective in the way stadium memory is cheap and effective. You walk out having been given the official Mahi: gifted, decent, inevitable. You have not been given the captain as a problem, a politician of the dressing room, or a man other men might have resented.
That is the bargain. The film is in a hurry to finish a life it has already decided was simple. Rajput makes the simplicity watchable. The rest is homage with a runtime problem.
The kids wailing in the row behind did not ruin it. Neither did the film’s fear of its own subject. It just never swung at the delivery that would have made “untold” mean something.
Rating: ★★★ 1/2
Watch MS Dhoni: The Untold Story on Disney+ Hotstar.
