MS Dhoni: The Untold Story review: Details his journey and rise in Indian cricket

MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, the biopic of India’s most successful wicketkeeper-batsman and captain is all about his journey to the top. The makers have managed to take you through a detailed and insightful view of Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s childhood. To their credit the recreation of his days back in Ranchi and the time he had started to realize sports especially football, badminton and tennis attracted him the most is spot on and leaves an impact.

The first part of the movie is really gripping as it runs through his adolescence, how he on the insistence of his school’s physical education teacher took up wicketkeeping in cricket from being a goalkeeper in the football team. The hurdles and difficulties that came his way and how he never stopped to believe in his dream.

The depiction of an Indian middle-class family where the father wants his son to work hard for securing a stable position in a government department is comprehensive with Anupam Kher playing his father Pan Singh’s role. His mother always believed that her son has huge dreams and won’t settle for anything mediocre and Dhoni’s sister played by Bhumika Chawla is a strong character as well.

But like it was expected Sushant Singh Rajput is the driving force in the movie. It is his movie; he is playing the protagonist and has worked really hard for the role. Sushant has accomplished a lot in perfecting Dhoni’s batting style, the mannerism, his body language and emulates it pretty flawlessly on the screen. He plays the shots like him, yes, the helicopter shot as well; the training he did with Kiran More has certainly worked.

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To go with his rise in the ranks and through in Indian cricket are two love stories. Disha Patani and Kiara Advani play his love interests in the movie. It isn’t given a major share, they are there for a brief while during which they sing and dance. There is also the time when MSD is heartbroken, the not so good phase of his personal life, but he saw overcame it and grew above all.

The second half is where you know it all, there are visual from real matches but most of his fans have those visuals perfectly etched in their memory and would seem like a repeat to them. Another aspect that the makers didn’t get into was his captaincy, there was no part covering how he went about his trades as a captain, the major victories have been captured but not how he was first appointed the captain as well as his decision making, strategizing and how he plied his trade as the skipper with billions of expectations on his shoulders.

They haven’t touched at the controversies either, the grey part was pretty conveniently skipped and there was also no mentions about the spot-fixing scandal in the IPL which involved his team Chennai Super Kings and his take on the entire issue. The scene where he talks to the selectors about excluding three players from the team is sort of incomplete since no names have been mentioned.

There are some things beautifully depicted and there are a few misses but more than anything else it’s an emotional ride that you will certainly enjoy. It’s a movie for his fans who were eagerly waiting for his biopic and for those who wanted to know his story before he became one of the biggest names in Indian cricket.

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