Member Reviews

“Papa, I want a lal batti gaadi and people to salute me. I want to be a minister,” says a goon with a nose stud to his grotesque dad. He gets it on a platter. In the wake of last year’s Jawan and this year’s Pushpa, the fondly-held theory that south Indian filmmakers have cracked the box-office code, gets busted with writer-director Kalees’ remake of Atlee’s 2016 Tamil film Theri. The exhausting plot in two sentences: fearless IPS officer DCP Satya Verma (Varun Dhawan) is on a collision course when he takes on gruesomely repulsive gangster Babbar Sher (Jackie Shroff) and kills his criminal son. The same one who wanted a lal batti gaadi and maims, tortures and sets on fire, helpless young girls.

A boy of maybe five or six stands over his dead parents. They’re in a row of bodies on the ground in front of a high-rise, construction workers who died because of low-quality netting. The builder at fault calls the boy over (he’s from the northeast—migrant labour!), gives him 10 rupees and tells him to buy some chocolate. In the next scene, John (Varun Dhawan) crashes the builder’s party, decimates his goons, and sends the man crashing through a window to his death. One of the onlookers is the young boy, who takes a triumphant bite of chocolate.

You know a movie is on shaky grounds when you find yourself agreeing with a sidekick who scoffs at the hero’s swagger, ‘Kahe ka Bachchan? Machhar aaya hai. Massal daal.’ Truth be told, Varun Dhawan’s good egg energy makes it hard to buy him as an indomitable hulk single-handedly taking on a battalion of goons and serving justice without worrying about the consequences. The amount of loud music and dramatic mood (rain, thunder, fire) gone in to make the actor look formidable is telling enough of how unsuitable he’s for the job. Directed by his assistant Kalees, Baby John is a scene-to-scene remake of Atlee’s Tamil hit, Theri with a couple of inconsequential tweaks and a superstar cameo that didn’t do anything for Singham Again and doesn’t do anything for this one either. Even if you haven’t watched Theri, which is purely fan service for Vijay fans, you wouldn’t miss out on anything. There’s no dearth of potboilers recycling the same old masala over the decades.

In the first part of Viduthalai, you’d remember the long trek Kumaresan (Soori) undertakes to reach the camp where he is posted as a police constable for the first time. Even for a story that takes more than five hours to unfold, you’d remember the slow pace with which he treks across terrains, water bodies and hills to finally get to the top. Until today, I felt the pacing was intentional because we needed to understand how remote and challenging it was going to be for Kumaresan to work there. Narratively too, it was important for us to register the hostile terrain everyone in this movie was fighting over, right from the locals to the police and the mining corporation that wants to set up shop there.

Watching a mass actioner is a bit like watching West Indies play T20 cricket. When it comes off, there’s no better sight in sports. It’s all fireworks and fury, natural showmanship and musical rhythm. It makes no sense, yet the joy is real. But when it doesn’t come off, it can look like one giant Steve Smith mishit: ugly, awkward, strange, abnormal. Baby John is an example. Nothing aligns. The timing is woefully off, the star wattage is awry, the sound mix is all over the place, the action is unimaginative, it’s 164 minutes of dated narrative tropes, and the money shots don’t add up. That’s the thing about the genre: it’s boom or bust. It’s high-risk, high-reward, high-everything filmmaking. West Indies either chases down 250 or gets skittled out for 45 — there is seldom an in-between version.

Ever questioned why zero, which has no value on its own, is bigger than nine when it is preceded by 1 and becomes 10? This question recurs through the Telugu family drama 35: Chinna Katha Kaadu (not a small story), directed by debutant Nanda Kishore Emani. Are Mathematics fundamentals not to be questioned? Should a student accept the norm, learn the syllabus and pass the examinations? The film starring Nivetha Thomas, Viswadev, Priyadarshi, child actors Abhay and Arun and more than 50 children is a heartwarming and a well thought out story that encourages its viewers to look within and take that first step towards overcoming setbacks. 35 portrays children as realistically as possible and feels like a return to an age of innocence.

The final season of What If…? Season 3 highlights Marvel characters, big and small, in unexpected ways. Honouring both the comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), it allowed the story to be taken further. Once more, Jeffrey Wright returns as the voice of The Watcher as he narrates these eight new stories from the multiverse, where characters from different worlds and times converge. While previous seasons were strong, this last season is a mixed bag. It starts off muddled and ends on a high note, leaving us wishing this season had a bit more substance. Each of the eight episodes of What If…? looks at an alternative universe where characters who wouldn’t ordinarily meet are featured. And of course, the casual fan or newbie will be extremely lost, as the series requires you to do your homework (watch all the stuff) before enjoying this even more. Some of the stories explored here include the Hulk accidentally creating a gamma monster that the Mech Avengers must battle with, Agatha Harkness going Hollywood and meeting up with Bollywood star King, the Watcher disappearing, and the most bizarre of all, Howard the Duck having a baby with Darcy Lewis!

Sometimes truth isn’t justice, and justice isn’t truth’. Delivered with both pain and profundity in the penultimate moments of Juror#2, this incandescent line not only sums up the film, but the justice system as a whole, anywhere in the world. Exposing the fault lines in our rules of crime and punishment, but in the kind of quiet yet forceful manner which has been a signature of his brand of filmmaking ever since Clint Eastwood first put on the director’s hat a staggering 53 years ago, Juror#2 is the type of film that makes your mind go back to it time and again even days and weeks after watching it.