Vijay Sethupathi is certainly the most versatile and interesting, not to mention basely pleasurable, “superstar” still kicking in the world cinema. His early performances for established masters of the Tamil screen Selvaraghavan, Karthik Subbaraj, Nalan Kumarasamy, and Vetrimaaran managed to skyrocket him to an unlikely stardom, while more recent efforts in Jawan, the Vidhuthalai saga, and Merry Christmas proves he’s just as experimental and daring as ever. That being said, the Pan-Indian entertainment complex being the way it is, Sethupathi’s also been in some rather terrible productions as well, including recently. Last year’s Maharaja was middling and derivative, while the year before that produced the impossible bore of Yaadhum Oore Yaavarum Kelir, and before that, the barely watchable and entirely reprehensible DSP.
So it was fair to assume that P. Arumugakumar’s Ace would be more of the same, especially considering his freshman work, Oru Nalla Naal Paathu Solren, ranks among Sethupathi’s notorious failures. But while Ace is far from perfect, it manages to support Sethupathi’s unorthodox rhythms without smoothing them into one-dimensional “charms,” and revives peculiar strands in Indian geopolitical identity one assumed Kollywood no longer found advantageous to explore. Sethupathi plays “Bolt” Kannan, a migrant worker relocated to urban Malaysia (most likely Kuala Lumpur, though the film never specifies). There he’s picked up by a shifty employer and trash collector played by Yogi Babu. Bolt has an unusual knack for petty theft, and a disposition for Robin Hood-esque feats of community support, one that escalates rather quickly into armed robbery when he and his pals accrue a phony debt to the local Tamil gangster.
In 2025, it’s strange to see a commercial film from any nation portray migrant workers and their host cities with such matter-of-factness as Ace does. Indians in Malaysia are understood as a fragile and oft-contradictory political class — culturally and (usually) economically second-class citizens, yet just as often politically advantaged by their more influential motherland. Bolt is welcomed into an off-kilter community of hustlers and hucksters, de facto rulers and those perpetually caught in the margins of an indifferent society. Folks are frequently caught between various stages of destitution and entrapment. Bolt’s friend and love interest struggles to break free from her abusive cop stepdad, who is himself blackmailing a prostitute into sexual slavery. Yogi Babu’s prospective girlfriend must pay a large sum to keep her business, apartment, and to most probably avoid debtor’s prison. Everyone we meet here appears to be shackled by unimaginable debt, regenerative debt where the consequence of a late payment is, one way or another, personal annihilation. Bolt gets a call from an old cellmate early in the movie, warning him that a return to “normal life” is impossible. He is correct even before the bank robbery: life abroad is not so far from life inside. Under the yoke of the market, citizens and transients alike are kept on very short leashes attached to a rotating door. There’s no telling when you might be yanked back in.
Arumugakumar is not a delicate enough cineaste to convincingly balance these pervasive contours with the film’s own propulsion toward the ridiculous, and especially during the third act, much of the narrative explodes into strange and often incomprehensible wish-fulfillment. He is, however, comfortable giving the reigns to his far more adept performers. Sethupathi plays his usual feckless, ditzy loser in registers both hilarious and deeply frustrating. His abilities far exceed those around him (as his mysterious criminal past attests) and therefore wields some amount of superpowered social mobility; he can commune equally with village roti vendors and high-level mob men without much change in personality. Chasing a buck supersedes all other social concerns, no matter how clumsy and inefficient he is on the road to victory. Aloof swagger hides a latent narcissism, which itself obscures the softhearted village idiot. There’s always a multitude to Sethupathi’s characters, a restless recalibration, but in Ace it only manages to deepen the hopelessness at the film’s core. All games are rigged, all schemes surveilled and guessed at from the very beginning. Bolt and his friends are trapped not only by a perpetual lack of money, but a sudden surplus as well. When his criminal designs do pan out, the wealth represents simply another method of state control and individual doom. Sethupathi is a man with a thousand faces, none of them original, all of them traceable. For every Rube Goldberg-penned escape plan, there is no escaping the global consensus against the stateless.
Its strange and sobering underbelly aside, Ace still manages a fun if feverishly constructed action spectacle. Fiscal anxieties are refigured into 21st century W.C. Fields acts, complete with hidden identities, nonsensical poker games, and lucid dreams of karmic retribution. Fights are orchestrated almost as participatory campaigns. Actors opt in and out of alliances without much fanfare, switch sides and motivations, take breaks, drink or smoke, disappear into the sprawl of bodegas and luxury hotels. Both faces of the film are united by a common reverence for the grift and the hustle, taking whatever chances of survival as immediate opportunities and, when they inevitably fall to pieces, taking the next one the capitalist playground offers with equal abandon. A strange ballet indeed, and one difficult to maintain, but it amounts to a rather honest depiction of modern life in the margins, with endless sympathy for those who have no way of wriggling out.
DIRECRTOR: P. Aarumugakumar; CAST: Vijay Sethupathi, Yogi Babu, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Rukmini Vasanth; DISTRIBUTOR: Cine Gold Entertainists; IN THEATERS: May 22; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 30 min.
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