Mani Ratnam is considered one of India’s finest directors, particularly among those working in the Tamil language, and is coming off a two-part critical and commercial smash with his Ponniyin Selvan films. Alas, the rather inexplicably-titled Thug Life does not make a particularly strong argument for his reputation. The plot involves Sakthivel, a mafia kingpin played by Kamal Haasan who has to juggle his adoptive son trying to take over his empire, a series of past grudges from his rivals that are gradually coming home to roost, and a series of women who suffer from his actions and then disappear as needed. Having a woman suffer a miscarriage and privileging our lead’s reaction is tasteless, but spending several minutes on his newly amnesiac wife’s blank and frightened reactions shortly after glossing over his acquisition of martial arts skills in a brief line of voiceover is just bizarre for an action movie.
Ratnam struggles throughout Thug Life with characterization, with a cast of characters who don’t register at all because they mostly just run through plot points to get us from Point A to Point B. Distinctive gestures are generally in short supply, but there’s enough generically expository conversations to potentially cause one to mistake Thug Life for a contemporary American blockbuster. The typically leisurely running time for Indian blockbuster movies — here hitting 165 minutes — largely results in a movie that feels like if you diluted one of the 80-minute Pre-Code gangster classics so far down that all traces of the original punchy flavor and rapid-fire gestures were disappeared entirely, leaving only their tendency to consist of the bare bones of a scenario. It’s all empty tropes in possession of little verve, with A.R. Rahman’s score trying every trick in the book to try and supply a lifeforce to something that’s mostly dead.
The one area where the film does achieve some success is in its action sequences, which have so much more energy than the rest of the film that one wishes Ratnam had just slashed the film down to those and whatever bare minimum of connective tissue need exist to justify them. The shootout and fight sequences are not anything that breaks new ground and probably don’t give reason to watch the entire overlong film, but they’re staged with a satisfying spatial coherence. This achievement isn’t as common as it ought to be nowadays, and the willingness to break out the martial arts for some flimsy reason possesses a certain amount of chaotic verve that gives the film some much-needed kick. But where the film actively excels is in its car chases (alas, only two): there’s an admirable eagerness to either destroy vehicles in a ridiculous fashion or to surround them with the inspiredly crazy staging of a seemingly endless sea of CGI pigeons that take flight as needed. If Ratnam ever decides he wants to make the Tamil-language equivalent of Mad Max: Fury Road, he might just be able to pull it off, but in that event and in the meantime, he desperately needs to take a cue from George Miller’s ability to find original worlds and build them up, because Thug Life is far too perfunctory and content to trade in cliché.
DIRECTOR: Mani Ratnam; CAST: Kamal Hassan, Silambarasan Rajendar, Trisha Krishnan, Nassar, Abhirami; DISTRIBUTOR: Prime Media; IN THEATERS: June 4; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 45 min.
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