*Spoilers Ahead*
What does a Mani Ratnam mass movie look like? How will he elevate, subvert and toy with masala cinema tropes? Also, what does a Mani Ratnam-Kamal Haasan reunion look like after 38 years?
You step into Thug Life eager and excited, with questions like these buzzing around your mind.
After all, the last time the two forces of nature worked together, the result was 1987’s Nayakan — one of the most celebrated, enduring films to come out of Indian cinema.
The film even featured on TIME Magazine’s list of the “All-Time 100 Best Films” in 2005.
But you step out of Thug Life unaffected and unmoved, disheartened that such legendary artists came together to offer up something so lacklustre and generic.
Thug Life, written by Mani Ratnam in collaberation with Kamal Haasan, is a film with a gloriously promising foundation that only seems to get feebler as it goes on.
An opening voiceover introduces us to a haggard gangster, Sakthivel Rangarayar (Kamal Haasan). As he’s about to face a horde of attackers, he tells us he’s been “playing a game with death” his entire life.
The idea is a potent one — That a man who’s only ever known violence and crime has repeatedly faced death but never succumbed. Death has taken all he holds dear but refuses to claim him. Survival is his penance. Immortality is his curse.
This is one half of the rich promise of Thug Life that it never quite delivers on.
Mani Ratnam Lite
The intent is admirable. Mani Ratnam attempts to craft a shoot-’em-up gangster saga with soul, layering lofty ideas over loud, crowd-pleasing thrills.
Thug Life tries to bridge the tonal worlds of Haasan’s previous blockbuster hits, Vikram and Nayakan, but ends up resonating as neither.
The result is Mani Ratnam at his most basic and generic. A spate of recent masala movies has suffered from the curse of the “off the rails, cash grab supercharged sequel”.
Simply put, the first film tends to be a (relatively) grounded, character-driven crime drama with masala packaging. The box office reception is surprising. Sequels are demanded. Money is pumped, budgets are inflated, the essence is watered down, character is sacrificed at the altar of flashy spectacle and pesky pan-India packaging.
The result is a sequel that, in tone, pitch and “dosage” feels fundamentally different from the earlier film that birthed it. It’s the Indian 2, L2: Empuraan, Pushpa 2 problem.
Except Thug Life somehow manages to suffer from this within a single film, giving us a second half that, tonally, seems to belong to a different film entirely.
The first half plays out like a conventional, though effective, gangster drama. Here the Mani Ratnam presence is felt. There’s nuance, there’s patience, there’s focus on character.
The incredibly well-paced opening leg effortlessly glides between the various characters and the simmering tension between them.
The stunning black and white flashback sequence that opens the film (which I would happily pay to experience again) introduces us to an impressively de-aged Kamal Haasan as a younger Sakthivel in the 90s.
Alongside his fellow gang members, he’s pinned down by the police during a shootout. Caught in the bullet-ridden chaos is a young boy, Amar, who Sakthivel chooses to save. It’s a decision that would come to define them both.
He later tells young Amar, who’s still reeling from the sight of his father’s lifeless corpse as a result of the shootout, that their destinies are now tied together by the God by death.
Sakthivel adopts the young boy out of guilt in a moment that calls back to Nayakan when Velu Naicker decides to help support the son of the police officer he kills.
Decades later, the boy would learn the truth and kill Naicker, underscoring that the cycle of violence is inevitable.
Sakthivel’s relationship with Amar (a solid Silambarasan TR) should have been this film’s beating heart. A complex, tricky, tender father-son relationship between two men bound together by violence, torn apart by ego and resentment.
What is hatred toward a father figure if not love misplaced? To some extent, the film succeeds in capturing this. Amar is Sakthivel’s right hand, and we’re given some tender moments that build their surrogate father-son dynamic.
Amar’s ability to get away with more than others stems from his willingness to disagree with Sakthivel — the way they squabble, the subtle nods they exchange — all quietly deepen their bond.
Chekka Chivantha Vaanam Recycled
Much of the first half of Thug Life feels like a retread of Chekka Chivantha Vaanam, revisiting themes and tensions from Mani Ratnam’s 2018 gangster saga.
That film centred on three brothers vying for control of their father’s criminal empire. In one scene, the youngest son (also played by Silambarasan TR) quips, while standing over his injured father in a hospital bed, that he should finish the job and take over the business. Thug Life takes that one dark joke, that single idea, and builds an entire narrative around it.
Thankfully, in this film, the growing rift between the two men unfolds more gradually and with greater patience, and we feel its progression.
When Sakthivel returns home after a year in prison, he sees how well Amar has taken to handling the family empire. Ego and insecurity ignite. No moment hammers home the cracks within their bond than when a teary Amar crumbles after he sees Sakthivel in the hospital, recovering from an assassination attempt. To which a cold Sakthivel responds with an accusation, implying that Amar may be responsible.
You can feel the love, betrayal and hurt between the two men erupt in an instant. The ground shifts.
There are other similarities with Chekka Chivantha Vaanam, too. Here Sakthivel’s brother, played by Nassar, starts to turn against him because he feels overlooked and “treated like a servant”.
The same words are used by the Arvind Swamy character in Chekka Chivantha Vaanam, as the eldest son who’s tired of living in his father’s shadow.
Both films also feature a don figure (Prakash Raj there, Kamal Haasan here) having an extramarital affair and making no effort to hide it.
If only Sakthivel’s mistress, Indrani (an underused Trisha), had more to do than play the damsel in distress or serve as a possession desired by both father and son.
The Curse Of The Second Half
It’s in the ice-capped mountains of Nepal that the film seems to lose its way entirely, setting the stage for a second half armed with scenes and sequences that make it all too easy to reach for the word “silly”.
For one, Sakthivel is shot by his own son and allies, and flung off the side of a mountain in a very Aragorn-esque style, as if they want to set up his post-interval revenge arc.
It’s not that he survives, but how he survives that I found bizarre — With a bullet in his abdomen, he crashes into countless branches on his way down, landing in the snow, barely clinging to life.
The typical trope here, as we’ve seen in films ranging from Batman Begins to Jawan, is that he’d be found by a local and nursed back to health. Except that Sakthivel saves himself.
He gets up, trudges on, and survives for what feels like days, only to be hit by an avalanche, which conveniently takes him to a monastery where he is, you guessed it, saved by a local and nursed back to health. It’s an odd series of events.
Granted it’s probably the film wanting to give him yet another tryst with death but it comes across as convoluted.
We then learn that he’s been away for two years and has now returned to get his revenge. If he truly cared about his family, why not return sooner?He answers this later on, monologuing about how he needed a year to recover from his injuries, which still doesn’t quite answer the question.
During his “years away” (though the passage of time barely registers), he claims to have trained in martial arts.
This is yet another strange choice because he film had already established he was a formidable fighter and gangster, so what purpose do the martial arts have? It’s used briefly during a night-time train station fight sequence, then forgotten entirely.
It’s in that sequence that we see Sakthivel face off against his old ally, played by the always enjoyable Joju George.
In the first half, Joju George’s character is framed as cunning and conniving. But later, he’s reduced to a textbook “villain’s henchman,” existing only to take the hero’s punches.
This is made worse by the fact that staging action and fight sequences clearly isn’t Mani Ratnam’s strong suit. The action is functional at best
There were moments during this latter half where I wondered: if this is the film Kamal Haasan wanted to make all along — an action-heavy, surface-level star vehicle — then why go to Mani Ratnam at all? This certainly isn’t his wheelhouse. Perhaps Lokesh Kanagaraj’s dates weren’t available.
The latter half of the film is also framed as tragic. Sakthivel returns to see the lives of his loved ones in pieces, as his revenge rampage only yields more pain and hurt. But this pain is never felt. The emotion is flaccid.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the scene where Sakthivel kills his backstabbing brother. After throwing his brother off a bridge, the rage on Sakthivel’s face is replaced by tears.
Except, the sudden shift in emotion feels jarring and unearned. Any sense of pain the film hopes to convey is lost in the blur of hollow action spectacle.
Then There’s the Amar Problem
The first half seems to promise a tale of two protagonists and the growing rift between them.
At its best, in these initial portions, you’re rooting for them both and siding with neither. But post-interval, Amar seems sidelined altogether and reduced to a wafer-thin “villain”.
That is until he’s kidnapped by a rival gangster (Ali Fazal), and swings back into action. Suddenly, the film seems to say, “Actually, Amar does still matter, and this is, in fact, a two-hander narrative”.
It’s why the impact of his death isn’t felt. By that point, the thought of an emotionally charged saga of two men, their connection, their love, their fallout and reuniting, feels like a distant dream.
This is partly because there seems to be a hesitance in committing to frame Sakthivel as a deeply flawed, selfish character. The pivot to a more traditional “hero” film takes centre stage.
I half expected Thug Life to end with a post-credit sequence featuring the enraged, bloodshot eyes of the now-orphaned son of Ali Fazal’s character staring into the fire of a funeral pyre, swearing revenge on Sakthivel. Cut to a title logo flashing on screen: “Thug Lives: Coming Soon”.
It’s the kind of sequel-announcement ending you’d expect from a more unapologetically commercial mass movie rather than a Mani Ratnam film. And therein lies the tragedy.
With Thug Life, the filmmaker, forever celebrated for finding new ways to tell stories within the constraints of mainstream cinema across decades, does the one thing we’d least expect from him. He conforms.
(Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He’s also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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