‘Thug Life’ movie review: Kamal Haasan’s fiery performance aside, Mani Ratnam’s gangster drama shoots blanks

‘Thug Life’ movie review: Despite an excellent Kamal Haasan, a restrained Silambarasan TR, great production design and superb cinematography, Mani Ratnam’s film is a generic gangster drama that makes you grope in the dark for its beating heart

When an auteur like Mani Ratnam returns to a genre he is known for, with a maverick multihyphenate like Kamal Haasan, the expectations are naturally high; the worst result one could anticipate is a film that works but doesn’t necessarily redefine the genre. Seldom would you expect a Thug Life, which bafflingly feels like a Mani Ratnam-ish film that gave in to the mainstream compulsion of being a modern-day Tamil potboiler. A 163-minute chronicle of an elderly gangster’s tryst with love, destiny, guilt and death, Thug Life is a gangster crime drama with stretches so generic and cold that you might wonder if it was really the filmmaker at the helm.

Given his oft-discussed distinct filmmaking style, you can’t help but look out for a certain Mani Ratnam-esque quality in the mise-en-scène, like the shots of a young boy running into a framed entrance of a chawl, and later, standing there helplessly, drowned in grief, in the initial portions of the film. The sheer promise that shone through the first twenty minutes or so is hard even to reminisce. We begin in 1994, in a scene of gorgeous monochrome. A police shootout ensues at a chawl in Old Delhi, where wanted gangster Rangaraya Sakthivel (a de-aged Kamal) and his chieftains — Manickam (Nasser), Pathrose (Joju George), Anburaj (Bagavathi Perumal) and co — have gathered. In a tragic turn of events, one of Sakthivel’s men inadvertently kills a newspaper vendor (Elango Kumaravel), leaving his two children orphaned.

Gutted by his death, Sakthivel adopts his son, Amar, and promises to find his sister, Chandra, who went missing in the commotion that followed the episode. With AR Rahman punctuating the enchanting ‘Anju Vanna Poove’ score with silences, the sequence tugs at your heartstrings. This is where the heart of this narrative resides, and this is the pulse of narration you expect from Mani Ratnam’s school of filmmaking. This is also what you hold onto as scenes move on to depict the life of Sakthivel from 2016 onwards — his tender moments with his wife Jeeva (Abhirami); his lust for his mistress Indrani (an underutilised Trisha); the warmth he shows Amar (a restrained Silambarasan TR); his enmity with his nemesis Sadhanand and the trouble it is sprouting in the form of Sadhanand’s revenge-thirsty brother-in-law Deepak (Ali Fazal); and a silent thirst for power that is growing among his men. Unfortunately, Thug Life winds its way hastily, unanchored to that potent crux.

The film shares at least six parallels with Kamal and Mani’s iconic 1987 gangster crime drama Nayakan — like a daughter-figure’s moral compass, a police officer’s quest to clean the city and his marital life, a grandson named after Sakthivel Naicker, and a son adopted from the weight of a sin — and it only makes the flaws more apparent in the modern take on the genre. Both films explore themes of guilt, morality and destiny, but Thug Life doesn’t bother itself with selling the emotional beats of the story. It seems like the urge to cater to modern, impatient audiences is not to be burdened by human drama and building strong characters with clear interpersonal dynamics, but rather make grand strokes with the action sequences.

Perhaps this is also why letting the dialogue convey necessary backstories, like Sakthivel’s equation with Manickam, comes across as weak and uneven; you must necessarily recollect the few rushed-through moments between Manickam and Amar to get a comprehensive understanding of the former’s dynamics with the latter and Sakthivel. You wonder why the scene of how Sakthi met Indrani wasn’t shrunk into a dialogue as well. Fascinatingly, the same film shows what could have been had there been more space to make these emotional beats felt. Jeeva’s arc with Sakthi gets superbly fleshed out; again, dialogue tells you how they met, the unspoken bond they share (“Kuthi pesra na azhugaya ulla vechikutu irukka nu artham,” he tells her at one moment), and you get set-ups with effective pay-offs, like a line she utters during a tiff.

This is a film that hardly takes a moment to breathe, and any scope for such drama is traded for pulsating action set pieces. Like a certain car chase scene that, while it may prove necessary for the larger scheme of things, overstays its welcome. This inclination towards making the film action-heavy is why a fight scene in which Sakthivel powers through a potent sedative does nothing except remind you of another such fight scene in Vikram, where Kamal’s character had to fight henchmen without making a noise.

Beyond this, it also doesn’t help that the film fails to add more to its archaic fight-for-the-throne conflict at the centre of the film. Subplots and layers seem added purely for convenience, like a character that returns in the climax to serve a meagre purpose. You also feel bad for Silambarasan since Amar never comes into his own or grows beyond what the plot requires him to do. A lion’s share of the screen space is given to Kamal, and the veteran aces his role as an ageing man fighting the God of Death — be it in the more tender moments like the aforementioned scene with Abhirami, or the many face-offs he has on rooftops and cliffs. But is he really feeling the weight of his actions or questioning his morality as the Sakthivel Naicker we once knew? The verdict is still out.