Company is a 2002 Indian Hindi-language crime film directed by Ram Gopal Varma and written by Jaideep Sahni.
The film stars Mohanlal, Ajay Devgan, Vivek Oberoi, Manisha Koirala, Antara Mali, and Seema Biswas.
Company follows Chandu, a henchman of a gangster named Malik, with whom he forms a rapport that eventually falls apart after tension arises between them.
Varma conceived the idea of the film after meeting a man named Haneef, who had been in prison for five years after the 1993 Bombay bombings and was a close aid of the underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in his D-Company.
Sreenivasan is criticised, but he and his men know that since many gang members are being killed, this war is making it easier for his department to dispose of Malik and Chandu.
The war results in an intense chase in Kenya, during which Malik hires assassins to kill Chandu, who is severely injured but survives.
Sreenivasan persuades Chandu to come back to Mumbai and fight his war with Malik by helping the police bring the mafia under control.
At a producer's house, director Ram Gopal Varma met a man named Haneef, who had been in prison for five years after the 1993 Bombay bombings.
[2] Varma started talking to Haneef out of curiosity and his "obsession with the criminal psyche", who told him how the underworld operated.
[3] During that time, the media was circulating stories about the conflict between Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan, who had a fallout and wanted to kill each other, thus giving Varma the idea for Company.
[3] During his research for Satya (1998), Varma found out several things he could not incorporate into one film, especially the police procedures, because there was too much information.
He played IPS Veerapalli Srinivasan, a character based on the former Police Commissioner of Mumbai, Dhanushkodi Sivanandhan.
[9] After that, he met Varma, who said he wanted to cast someone as a gangster living in a slum and said Vivek Oberoi "look(s) too good for the role".
[3] For the opening sequence, Varma wrote and used a fake informational voice-over about eagles waiting for months for their prey because it was "profound-sounding".
[3] Varma filmed the song "Khallas" hand-held with a camera "as a guest at a seedy disco where people find it difficult to move around" because he did not want to have a "picture-perfect composition".
[7] The soundtrack album of Company was composed by Sandeep Chowta with lyrics written by Sahni, Nitin Raikwar and Taabish Romani.
[13] Ziya Us Salam of Idlebrain.com called it "the kind of new century fare, which tells you to welcome a cinema with muted colours, snooping camera angles and almost unrelieved suspense", and added, "It is a grim film which lives in stilted frames, which thrives on silhouettes".
[14] Derek Elley of Variety wrote; "By Bollywood standards, a dark and realistic look at the Mumbai underworld through the battle between a powerful don and his vengeful former sidekick, Company manages to cater to Hindi cinema norms while feeding the viewer something a little different.
"[22] In 2010, Raja Sen wrote in his review; "This finely plotted duel between two gangsters left us battered, bruised and craving more".
[29] British director Danny Boyle cited Company and Satya as inspirations for his Academy Award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (2008).