24 frames per second

Lokesh Kanakaraj’s Coolie does a lot right, I’ll admit.

For one, it is incredibly violent and macabre. The A certificate is earned. I’m not advocating for the body count, but it’s surprising to see a Rajni movie be this… uninhibited. But Lokesh cast him, managed to make the movie he wanted to make, and gave him enough room to perform. Better yet, he still managed to fit in a lot of the fan service bits and mass moments one expects. Also, whenever Rajni plays an old guy with a shadowy past these days (which is pretty much in every movie), you worry about the flashback scenes involving bad make-up (or, these days, bad de-ageing). I am happy to report that Lokesh found a way around most of these issues.

Soubin Shahir is absolutely excellent, and watching him dance to Monica like a bicyclist on crystal meth trying to inflate a flat tyre (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) is an absolute delight. Nagarjuna’s Simon is no Rolex, but he doesn’t disappoint either.

The film is well shot and edited, and the script feels devoid of fat. A couple of songs could’ve been jettisoned but this is no sin. A lot of the signature Lokesh bits – a twisty plot, a colourful array of villains, all those little callbacks and symmetries, quirky musical choices… they’re all there.

Like I said, a lot of it works.

And yet.

Lokesh’s films have found a way to put drama at the heart of the action. It is what makes some of his best fight scenes work — the one near the interval point in Master, or the one in the house with a sleeping child in Vikram. His plots allow his characters to breathe, even when they’re twisty and keep piling one thing atop another.

There are three major plot threads: the machinations involving a criminal enterprise and the people trying to bring it down, the way the Sathyaraj character gets entangled in all of this, and the underlying family drama.

The first is largely solid, and some of the big twists work wonderfully. The only real weakness is the fact that there are so many goons (who really ought to spend a portion of their ill-gotten gains on a visit to the barbershop) that one can no longer keep track of them or their loyalties, which makes the plot a bit more confusing than it is.

The unit economics of the operation also seem a bit off to me, but really, the actual crime is just a MacGuffin.

The Sathyaraj character’s connection to the plot involves something very macabre, but this whole segment is a letdown. I will not reveal what it is, except to say that it made me feel the way I did about some aspects of the flashback in Leo. Maybe a bit more exposition would’ve made it work.

The worse sin is that the dramatic potential in this thread is entirely squandered. Here are some people living ordinary lives, who find themselves in circumstances that should really shatter them psychologically. You don’t see any of it. It feels like the script chose movement over soul, and the performances didn’t fill in the gaps either.

As for the family drama, there’s a lot here that could’ve worked, but doesn’t. A key revelation involving a phone call in the pre-climax portions ought to land a gut punch; it barely registers. The filmmaking is fine in that scene but we haven’t seen enough of those characters as people to be emotionally invested in that moment.

Kill twenty or forty fewer goons, and give the main characters a bit more time to talk, and this would’ve been a very different film.

The less said about the scene involving Aamir, the better. It’s fun, but it simply doesn’t compute. In a different film this would’ve fit in just fine. Not in this one.

As it stands, Coolie has good bones but ultimately feels more like an empty exercise in style than the solid action-drama Lokesh is capable of delivering.