Greatness and respect are earned and not inherited. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was perhaps the living embodiment of that sentiment as he clawed, persevered and outwitted adversity to rewrite Indian history under the Mughal rule. Raja Shivaji is the kind of film that wanted to tell this extraordinary hero’s tale with untamed gusto. Riteish Deshmukh’s passion project, years in the making, soaked in research and genuine reverence for its subject arrives on screen looking every bit the epic it promises to be. The tragedy is that it only ever looks the part.
From its opening frames, the film announces itself with considerable visual authority. Santosh Sivan’s cinematography drapes the Western Ghats in a grandeur that feels both earned and authentic. The production design is meticulous. Forts, courtyards, battle formations and royal chambers all rendered with a care that speaks to the obsessive preparation behind the project. Ajay-Atul’s score is perhaps the film’s single greatest achievement, a musical canvas that understands the emotional register of every scene it accompanies, swelling precisely when needed and pulling back with equal intelligence. If Raja Shivaji were a painting, it would be a magnificent one. The problem is that paintings don’t breathe.
The sense of epicness in this film is almost entirely a surface condition. Visually and aesthetically, Riteish Deshmukh has built something impressive. Narratively and emotionally, the scale never truly materialises. And with Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as your subject, a figure whose standing in Maratha history, in Hindu history, in the national imagination of India is without parallel, adequacy is simply not enough. This story demands a roar. What we get, too often, is a dignified murmur.
The central failure of the writing is this: we never truly witness Shivaji’s transformation. There are gestures toward it, a childhood longing for a free and united Maratha kingdom, a growing restlessness under the yoke of foreign fiefdom, but the film does not dramatise the crucible. The precise psychological and emotional moment when young Shivaji Bhonsale stops being a member of a vassal royal family and becomes a strategic warlord, a sovereign thinker, a leader of historic consequence, that transition, which is arguably the entire point of the film, is sketched rather than sculpted. We are told who Shivaji becomes. We are not made to feel the becoming.
The action sequences suffer from a connected problem. The ideas behind them are often genuinely good, and there is visible ambition in how the battle choreography has been conceived. But too many of the key sequences feel staged, a quality that should be invisible in a feature film of this scale in 2026 but is not. There is a rehearsed quality to certain stunts, a choreographed tidiness to confrontations that should feel savage and chaotic. Worse, too many scenes carry the unmistakable DNA of historical films and prestige television that preceded them. One watches certain sequences and recognises their ancestry a little too easily. In the shadow of what Indian cinema has achieved with historical action in recent years, the benchmark is high and well established. This registers as a missed opportunity.
The performances are a different story. Riteish Deshmukh does not possess the charismatic aura that centuries of iconography have attached to Shivaji Maharaj, and in his early scenes this gap feels apparent. But Deshmukh is a more intelligent actor than he has sometimes been given credit for, and his performance grows steadily and surely into the role. By the film’s middle and latter chapters, he plays Shivaji with a quiet, convincing vigour, embodying the character’s inner life rather than attempting to perform its mythology. It is a restrained, cerebral portrayal that earns your respect even where it may not ignite your imagination.
Abhishek Bachchan as Sambhaji, Shivaji’s elder brother, delivers one of the film’s finest performances in a role that is briefer than it deserves to be. There is a layered complexity to his portrayal, the weight of legacy, the tension between loyalty and political survival that leaves you wishing the screenplay had given him more room to breathe. Genelia D’Souza as Sai, Shivaji’s wife, brings a composed and affecting grace to a role that could easily have been merely decorative. She doesn’t allow it to be. Vidya Balan and Bhagyashree both make their presences felt meaningfully despite limited screen time, and the wider supporting ensemble featuring Amole Gupte, Fardeen Khan, Jitendra Joshi, Sachin Khedekar and others, fills out the world of the film with commendable craft.
Sanjay Dutt’s Afzal Khan is exactly as menacing as you would expect Sanjay Dutt to be when given a villain of this stature. The physicality is formidable, the silences loaded with threat. And yet, for audiences who have recently watched him in Dhurandhar and its sequel, the performance exists in uncomfortably familiar territory. Dutt is working from the same register, the same brooding authority, the same slow-burning malevolence. The instinct to cast him was correct. The execution needed more distance from his recent work to feel fully fresh.
The question of historical fidelity will matter to many viewers, and rightly so. The film is broadly careful with its source material, and the research that went into the screenplay are evident in its period detail. But two omissions stand out. Aurangzeb, whose ambitions cast a long and defining shadow over so much of Shivaji’s story and legacy, is conspicuously absent in ways that leave the political canvas feeling incomplete. And the depiction of Afzal Khan’s assassination, while dramatically presented, sidelines the wagh nakh, the tiger claws, one of the most legendary instruments in all of Maratha history, to a degree that feels like a curious creative choice for a film so deeply invested in honouring its subject. These are not casual omissions. They are decisions that will leave historically conscious audiences with questions the film makes no attempt to answer.
Salman Khan’s cameo as Jiva Mahala, the fiercely loyal warrior who protected Shivaji Maharaj at one of the most critical moments in his life, arrives late in the film accompanied by enormous audience anticipation that the internet has been stoking for weeks. The cameo is watchable, and the sentiment behind the casting is genuinely touching. But the execution doesn’t deliver the thunderclap the moment demands. It lands as a crowd-pleasing footnote rather than a scene of consequence, and it will not, despite the social media noise surrounding it, alter the film’s overall standing.
Raja Shivaji enters cinemas on the back of Chhaava’s extraordinary success, a film that demonstrated, with clarity and force, that Indian audiences are not just willing but hungry for serious, emotionally muscular historical cinema. Riteish Deshmukh knows this. He has, after all, spent years preparing to meet that hunger. The craft on display here is real. The dedication is unimpeachable. But dedication and craft, without the dramatic courage to truly inhabit the darkness and complexity of a legendary life, produce something that is respectful rather than revelatory.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s story, the full, unvarnished, extraordinary sweep of it, deserves cinema that roars as loudly as the man himself did. Raja Shivaji honours him. It does not yet do him justice. Watch this as a reminder that legends and fables of Indian history and it’s veritable heroes like Shivaji Raje Maharaj still have a sweeping relevance with young, modern Indian audiences. But we need to tell these stories with a new vigour and granular detail that cannot be anything less than epic.
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