Indian 2 Movie Review: Go back, Indian

While watching Indian 2, I remembered the best of Shankar with a certain wistfulness. The best moments in his work made us believe everything could be possible. You could master Bharatanatyam in a week. Hell, you could even become a Chief Minister tomorrow, if destiny wanted it for you. His use of VFX was so unique in bringing a certain playfulness to the theatre experience. The idea may not be so novel anymore, but the beginning of Indian 2 shows that his strengths can still be effective—like the skit of a corrupt man who gets shot but is protected by wads of cash on his chest, like that animated figure of the common man which is a part of the YouTube videos of Chitra Aravindhan (Siddharth) and friends. These ideas still remind you that this filmmaker’s strengths aren’t necessarily dated—which is why I didn’t understand the desperate homages to his own work in this film. The nakkal-nickel joke from Enthiran, the bajji dialogue from Sivaji… Why fall back on past glory when you have the chance to build on it with a sequel to perhaps your best film? Why risk taking away from the authenticity of this universe? In a film where everything works, these would spark wild celebration, but in this film, where almost nothing works…

Director: Shankar

Cast: Kamal Haasan, Siddharth, Vivekh, Jagan, Priya Bhavani Shankar, Samuthirakani

The best Shankar films gave flight to your impossible dreams, to your impossible hopes for a utopian future. But they weren’t just about VFX gimmickry; they weren’t just about a fanciful premise. The impossibility of the protagonist’s aspiration was held aloft by solid storytelling principles which combined grand world-building with authentic personal emotion. I wistfully considered all of this, as I experienced what’s arguably the director’s weakest film yet—and what a pity, considering that he brings back to life a ferocious, dogged man, Senapathy. In this film, the many gimmicky looks he’s given take away from the seriousness of his character—and it doesn’t help that the make-up makes Senapathy look like a pale, rotting imitation of what he once was. That’s about his outside. We get nothing of note about his inside either.

For reasons I’ll never understand, Senapathy seems to have been treated as a cool vigilante figure whose strength is his ‘varma kalai’ ability. That’s an unfortunate Marvel-ification of a man whose foremost attraction is his sharp intelligence and his unshakeable ideological conviction, personal losses be damned. He’s flawed, but attractively so—but this film shows no interest in his personality, satisfied instead to exploit Senapathy for silly attempts at entertainment, like having him mimic a cat. For all the Senapathy time we get in this film, it’s a brief clip from the first film’s climax (when Senapathy is shocked that his stabbed son yelps, “Appa!” and not “Amma!”) which drew the most emotion out of me.

It was always going to be a challenge to repurpose Senapathy for today’s world. How would this unshakeable extremist with zero tolerance inspire people today? Will he still be motivated to violence? He would have plenty of reason to act, of course, given the rich-poor divide, given the rampant corruption, given all the rot. But it’s all a lot for one man to process, for one film to compress. Where Senapathy’s speech in the Nizhalgal Ravi murder scene felt so powerful, here, it feels like a boomer droning on to no real effect. And no visual of Siddharth and friends nodding along, helps. The vigilante in this film is more Joker than Batman, strangely enough. He lets out a small evil laugh when people are about to die—and on one occasion, he doesn’t even seem to care that the victim is a good police officer. When society condemns him, I imagine that the desired reaction is one of support for Senapathy, but this film had rather killed my empathy for him by then. When an ally of his loses a close one, he stands frozen, offering almost a corporate hand of support. Where’s the emotion? Where’s the man who removed his moustache permanently because his infant son said it hurt him?

There are so many questions to answer, but Indian 2 pays them no heed. What does Senapathy feel about having to clean up his society all over again? Surely, he would hurt and suffer, but this film presents him as though he were rather amused by it all. The police almost catch him when he lands in India, but he escapes and before doing so, meows at them. Senapathy didn’t seem like a man who enjoyed his kills; he did it because he knew no other way and he believed in fear as an effective reformative tool. It’s a disagreeable strategy, but this man is flawed, given that he spent his youth in a time of war. Where is such detailing here? Where is any reference to his family? How does he deal with being responsible for the deaths of his children? What did his wife think of it?

Perhaps the idea was for Indian 2 to skip all personal angles and jump straight into becoming a ‘social’ film. Where then is the deep socio psychological commentary on our society and its people? From out of nowhere, Senapathy comes up with the brainwave of inspiring people to rat on their near and dear ones—and it’s an idea that could well have been the theme of this whole film. Senapathy thinks country first, but what’s a country if not its very-many units of people? For him, mind and heart are the same, but what of the likes of Chitra Aravindhan (an invested Siddharth)? How do you get them to look past their families? The portion that touches upon this late into the second half is the film’s best—and notably, Senapathy isn’t part of it for the most part. This got me wondering if Senapathy was even needed for this film. Were the gimmicky kills needed? Would it not have been sufficient to have the influence of Indian affect this film and its characters? But perhaps that’s a different film entirely. Shankar’s Indian deserved a sequel that was ready to sink into nuances, but Indian 2 doesn’t even address the fundamental question of whether a black-or-white extremist can understand/inspire the greyness of his country’s people.

Even the manner of Senapathy’s executions in this film is laughably childish. In the first film, you got the haunting image of a killed man, whose mouth fills up with rice spilling from a sack (a nod to a previous Manorama line). Here, one victim trots like a horse on the road. Another becomes feminine and director Shankar has him acting all coy and shy and covering his chest (like women are expected to do, apparently)—and all of this is supposed to make us laugh. Yet another leaks bodily fluids through his mouth, which Senapathy guides with his finger in zero gravity to form warning text. It’s like Senapathy, during his Taipei vacation, saw Anniyan, and decided that he could get gimmickier with his kills—and worse, that he could enjoy them too.

Bobby Simha, playing Pramod (son of Inspector Krishnaswamy from the first film), is restricted to looking rather irritated from start to finish. He’s a crafty cop who can’t hold his gun tight. If this were a film interested in anyone’s emotions, it would focus on telling us why for Pramod, catching Senapathy is a ‘life ambition’. Instead, we get a 100-something man racing along on a unicycle for what seems like eternity, before getting off and showing off his musculature to a group of topless, gym-going men. It seems Senapathy, during his vacation in Taipei, caught a screening of Shankar’s I as well.

The director’s films aren’t exactly remembered for well-informed politics, considering they aim to offer populist catharsis. But you still don’t expect a dig at government freebies. I suppose nuances of social equality are a tall ask for a film whose protagonist’s important dialogue comes with fundamental lip-sync issues. You know a film is not working when even the late Vivekh struggles to get going with his one-liners. The man, known for dropping nuggets of knowledge in his humour, uses light-year as a unit of time (when it’s a unit of distance)—but as I said, nothing really works in Indian 2.

You know how sometimes a sequel is called a ‘spiritual sequel’? Indian 2 can be called a deeply dispiriting sequel, I think; it’s a film that shows almost no understanding of the soul and strength of the first film and its protagonist. For these reasons, it’s really hard not to join the chorus of citizens in this film as they fling objects at the protagonist and yell, “Go back Indian!”