Company
Synopsis:
Halfway through the movie, Chandu is sitting in this wildly tense room in Kenya wearing a remarkably hideous neon-striped track jacket that looks like it was bought at a deeply confused discount store, and he's just staring intensely at a bowl of lukewarm noodles while sweat drips off his nose and he refuses to answer his phone because he knows Malik is on the other end, but to understand why these two are at each other's throats you really have to look back at how this whole partnership started in the first place, which wasn't even pretty since they met in a dirty Mumbai alley where Ajay Devgan's character, Malik, was just running some petty extortion racket and didn't look like a kingpin at all, and then Vivek Oberoi shows up as Chandu, this hotheaded street kid with terrible hair who can't throw a punch without screaming, but somehow they just click and start beating up rival gang members in dark stairwells and taking over the local protection rackets.
So then they rise through the ranks of the underworld because Malik has all the brains and stays cool while wearing these crisp white shirts that never seem to get dirty even when people are shooting at him, and Chandu is just the chaotic muscle who runs around causing absolute mayhem and falling in love with a dancer named Saroja played by Manisha Koirala, who doesn't even want anything to do with mob life at first but gets dragged right into it anyway because she can't resist Chandu's goofy charm, and honestly, the whole dynamic changes when they move from petty street crime into high-level syndicate operations and start dealing with politicians and corrupt cops who want a piece of the action.
The funny thing is that whenever they make a big move, they always have to deal with Inspector Rathod, this weathered police commissioner played by Mohanlal, who walks around with a permanent look of tired annoyance, and he spends half his time leaning against doorways drinking tea and telling everyone that he's going to wipe them out, but he can't ever seem to stick any charges on them because they're too smart, and that's the core conflict of the whole picture.
Right after that, the power struggle begins. Malik gets paranoid and starts cutting people out, and Chandu gets defensive because he thinks he built half this empire with his bare hands, and they have this huge falling out over a botched hit where Malik gives an order behind Chandu's back, and things spiral completely out of control until Chandu has to pack up and flee the country with Saroja to escape a literal hit squad sent by his own best friend, which brings us right back to that sweaty Nairobi apartment with the neon jacket and the noodles.
Anyway, Chandu tries to run his own operations from abroad, but it's just not the same without Mumbai, and Malik sends more guys after him, and everyone's shouting on satellite phones about territory and money, and nobody knows who to trust anymore, and the pressure just mounts until the police finally close in on both of them in a massive coordinated sweep across international borders that changes the entire underworld landscape forever.
Company really shook up the usual formulas found in bollywood movies during that era, steering far away from the singing and dancing that most hindi films relied on, and instead giving audiences this gritty, fast-paced crime drama that made you feel like you were right there in the smoke-filled rooms with the gangsters. It totally changed how bollywood approached gritty realism, and compared to older hindi movies that always had some cheesy moral lesson at the end, this one just threw you into the deep end of the criminal lifestyle and refused to sugarcoat any of it.
Chandu gets captured and brought back to India by the authorities, and even though Malik is still sitting pretty in his high-rise office thinking he's won, Inspector Rathod corners him in a parking garage and slaps the cuffs on him without even blinking.
Vivek Oberoi wears his sunglasses way too low on his nose during the opening sequence of Company, a small wardrobe choice that immediately establishes his character as a kid trying on an older man's skin. Ram Gopal Varma doesn't bother with establishing shots of Bombay to orient the viewer, choosing instead to drop you straight into a cramped room where men are shouting about extortion over the sound of a ceiling fan rattling against its mount. It is 2002 and Bollywood movies were still largely obsessed with rich kids falling in love in Switzerland, which makes the arrival of this grimy, handheld exercise in urban paranoia feel less like a shift in tone and the opening of a window in a room that had been sealed shut for decades. Nobody is singing. The lighting looks like it was captured by someone hiding behind a pillar with a DV camera they rented that morning, shooting in hallways painted the color of stale mustard.
The script by Jaideep Sahni refuses to explain the criminal enterprise through convenient exposition dumps, letting the characters talk in unfinished sentences and half-baked threats that make you lean forward just to catch the cadence. Malik is played by Ajay Devgan with his eyes half-closed, projecting an absolute stillness that makes everyone else in the frame look like they are vibrating out of control. When he kills a rival don in a crowded Bangkok shopping mall, he doesn't run from the cops or deliver a monologue about the nature of power, but simply walks toward the escalator with his hands in his pockets while the crowd parts like water around a stone. It is a terrifying display of ego disguised as common sense. Opposing him is Mohanlal as Srinivasan, a police commissioner who drinks endless cups of tea and watches the city through slatted blinds, looking exhausted by the sheer volume of paperwork required to keep the underworld functioning at a predictable tempo. Mohanlal brings a gravity to the proceedings that grounds the more theatrical elements of the crime saga, treating every interrogation like an uncomfortable chat between old neighbors who happen to be on opposite sides of a loaded pistol. The way he adjusts his glasses while listening to a wiretap makes you believe he has been doing this job for thirty years and expects to do it for thirty more, regardless of who ends up dead in the gutter.
Then there is Vivek Oberoi as Chandu, bouncing around the screen with a manic energy that somehow avoids tipping over into cartoonishness, mostly because you can see the precise moment his character realizes he is out of his depth. Their partnership is built on pragmatic violence and mutual exploitation, photographed by Hemant Chaturvedi with a high-contrast palette that bleeds the color out of the city until everything looks like old parchment and rusted iron. The camera rarely sits still, constantly panning across tables, tracking feet under doors, and catching reflections in car windows as if the equipment itself is trying to escape the claustrophobia of the rooms it inhabits. Sandeep Chowta’s score relies heavily on distorted electric guitars and low-frequency thrums that occasionally drop out entirely to leave you listening to the heavy breathing of a man hiding behind a dumpster. It avoids the swelling orchestral melodrama usually found in hindi films of that era, opting instead for industrial noise that sounds like a factory grinding its own gears to dust.
Manisha Koirala gets saddled with the film's most thankless role as Saroja, Malik’s partner who spends most of her screen time looking worried in expensive apartments with marble floors. She does what she can with the material, but the script cuts away from her whenever the plot needs to get back to the boardroom arguments between Malik and Chandu. It’s a structural imbalance that hurts the emotional core of the narrative because the domestic scenes feel rushed compared to the meticulous pacing of the gang's operational logistics. Speaking of things that bugged me, there is a recurring sonic motif—a harsh screeching violin scrape—that plays every single time a character contemplates betrayal, and by the fourth time it happens, you want to reach into the speakers and cut the string yourself. It is a minor annoyance in a film that otherwise has absolute confidence in its own rhythm, refusing to pander to the audience by slowing down for the slower members in the back row.
Comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas are inevitable and mostly lazy, but Company actually shares more DNA with the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s, specifically Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, in how it portrays institutions as vast, indifferent machines that consume the people foolish enough to try and steer them. The violence is never stylized into balletic heroics, which sets it apart from the bullet-heavy excesses that would come to dominate action cinema over the next ten years. People die in doorways and stairwells, gasping for air on dirty linoleum while bystanders stare at their shoes. The central tragedy of the story isn't that crime doesn't pay, but that the men running the empire are ultimately just middle-management bureaucrats with better bodyguards and more expensive watches. When the friendship at the heart of the enterprise finally fractures, it happens over a misunderstanding about territory and jurisdiction rather than some grand betrayal of honor. By the time the credits roll over a quiet, unresolved conversation in a parking garage, you realize you have just watched one of the few hindi movies that understood the difference between being dark and being genuinely menacing.