24 frames per second

Statutory warning: Here be spoilers.

For more or less the entire first half of the film, I was transfixed by Leo. The writing is clean, the screenplay flows like water, the action is well shot, and Vijay finds another gear I didn’t know he had. The opening stretch involves a stunningly shot and edited encounter with a hyena, and by the time the plot gets going, we’re entirely immersed in the world of this quiet coffee shop owner with unplumbed depths. It keeps getting better, as a bunch of criminals come to town, and when they are followed by others who believe he is someone other than who he claims he is.

And then… well, here’s where the film falters. Firstly, I found myself doing a Cary Grant from Arsenic and Old Lace: “When you say others, you mean… others? As in, more than one others?” There’s Mysskin and his crew, followed by Madhusudan Rao. Which is okay. But then Sanjay Dutt enters the picture. And Arjun. And a goon-filled convoy of vehicles large enough to cause a small Himachal town look like Outer Ring Road on the evening of the ill-fated Trevor Noah show. And you realize that the screenplay now has all the mobility of the average car on the aforementioned road that evening.

The second half of the film is essentially about one man claiming he isn’t who all these goons think he is. It’s practically like a drinking game, except, every time this question is asked and answered, someone dies. Or many someones. Couldn’t the backstory have been simpler and more plausible? Couldn’t they have jettisoned a whole bunch of characters? (Not Mansoor Ali Khan though. Keep him in there by any means necessary. Or George Maryan — this man has, thanks to the LCU and Kalakalappu, become my favourite movie cop of all time.) The trouble with so many characters is, we’re never really emotionally invested.

One of the pleasures of a Lokesh Kanakaraj film is the effectiveness of the action set pieces, but apart from some bravura moments in the first half and the odd clip in the second half, the film doesn’t make you feel his desperation. Take, for instance, the fight in Vikram’s house when Kamal tries to keep things quiet and protect his grandson — the physical constraint (the need to keep things quiet) and the emotional stakes (his grandson’s life is at stake) are combined brilliantly to create a thing of beauty. You get that sense of desperation in the incident at the coffee shop that kicks things off here. You have innocent lives at stake. You have a bunch of goons with a, um, history of violence. By the time the action explodes, you’re primed for it. But when he’s fighting off yet another bunch of goons (who, as per the norm these days, seem to be striving towards a Gillette-free society as earnestly as the LCU heroes strive towards a drug-free one), you can barely suppress a yawn. You just want to get to the point where you know whether he is or isn’t who he claims to be.

Despite this gaping hole where an engaging script and a more economical cast of characters needed to be, the film offers a few pleasures. There are a few tributes to filmmakers (Scorsese and Tarantino) that Lokesh has cited as major influences, and they all work just fine. (It also bears mentioning that the opening stretch is at least a little bit reminiscent of Tiger Zinda Hai.) My favourite, though, is a Moondram Pirai reference that had me in splits because — and I swear this is true — I thought of the exact same thing before Vijay said it.

The bigger pleasure is in watching Vijay perform under a director who seems to know what to do with him. Let’s be clear: this is still a commercial film performance from perhaps the most bankable star in the Thamizh firmament, and the writing isn’t as good as in Master. Still, when the norm is a completely invulnerable character like in Varisu, this performance comes across as a stretch. There are little touches in the writing with regard to his character — towards the end, you see him say eppidi da irukke to another character, and somehow, that single line and his tone of voice rings truer than everything that has happened in the preceding 20 minutes or so. His relationship with his family suffers from some uneven writing, but a key conversation with Trisha in the third act works beautifully.

The ending is a bit of a curiosity. The big action sequence fails on every level imaginable, but the parallel sequence in Himachal works. It asks more questions than it answers, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The bigger question is, given what the whole film has been about, is this a wise decision? I suspect my answer will vary depending on which day of the week you ask me. Still, it takes some courage and trust in the audience to do this.

My cousin worried before the film that the law of averages would catch up to Lokesh. As it happened, he wasn’t wrong. But if this is what we get when Lokesh has an off day, I can live with that.