24 frames per second

The meat of Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 AD involves the pursuit of a pregnant woman on the run from a place called The Complex where her primary function is that of a breeder. The ones helping her escape through an arid landscape are rebels who occasionally bump foreheads as a gesture of solidarity and affection. (If any of you feel, um, mad or furious about that plot point, that is completely understandable.)

The Complex itself is a huge, inverted pyramid in the Kashi of the future, where the river Ganga has dried up, religion is banned, and commoners fight for scraps. For a lot of them, including our hero, getting into The Complex is the goal. They see it as a stairway to heaven.

Which is apt because Kalki as a film soars about as much as a lead zeppelin.

Here’s the thing: The setting is new, but what the characters do is mostly stuff you’ve already seen. So you either want to be surprised by how the setting makes the familiar play out in unfamiliar ways, or you want to be surprised by the visual flourishes the filmmaker adds to what you’ve seen a million times. Unfortunately, this happens a lot less often than it needs to for a film of this nature.

Take the hero introduction scene. There’s a chase, some banter involving a fugitive, his pursuers, a sassy AI assistant and the hero, and then there’s a fight sequence. This ought to work infinitely better than it does. Where’s the pop and crackle? As it stands, you have a sequence written as action-comedy but the filmmaking sucks the action and the comedy and the soul out of it. The second half does a much better job of getting the action sequences to work, but even then it feels like it’s playing out a fraction of a beat slower than ideal.

Now, to be fair, I watched the film in its Tamil dubbed version, and the jaw-droppingly bad dubbing quality might have something to do with my experience. But if you’re using up something like the GDP of a small country in making this film and plan to release it in multiple languages, isn’t this something you have to get right as well?

It is only inside The Complex, with the subplot about controlled breeding and some sort of super-serum, that the film finds some intriguing ground to work with. (Then of course there’s the fact that Kamalhassan presides over The Compound Complex and speaks in typically cryptic fashion — I had to laugh out loud at that one.)

The reason why it feels so disappointing is that the premise itself holds so much promise: A post-apocalpytic action fantasy that blends reincarnation drama with Indian mythology is a great starting point. Aswaththama — someone we rarely think about when we recall the Mahabharata — gets a redemptive arc. Kashi — one of the most unique cities in India — becomes a hot dystopian mess. The fact that most major religions have some kind of end-of-days mythology of some sort is referenced. There’s even a sassy AI assistant to satisfy those who cannot bear to see this much money spent on something not involving a Stan Lee creation.

Like I said, there’s plenty here to work with. Only, you end up with what is imagined as a lean, mean machine, spinning its wheels in the mud. Make of that analogy what you will.